Financial systems are where you shine. You know your knowledge of business processes and analytical capabilities will make you an excellent asset to a company’s financial team.
Are you analytically planning your resume and writing a cover letter in the same way to impress employers?
Our junior financial analyst resume templates will help you out, along with our growing library of resume examples. We’re proud to have helped plenty of financial professionals land a career; you’re in good hands!
What Matters Most: Your Junior Financial Analyst Skills & Work History
As a financial professional, you know better than anyone that managing a company’s books and optimizing the bottom line are the keys to success. You’ll want to show companies you have the skills it takes to help them in these processes.
Use your analytical capabilities to look over the job description and notice what skills the company is emphasizing. Use that to your advantage by including job-specific core competencies in the skills you list on your resume.
To help you further, here are some popular skills companies look for in junior financial analysts.
9 popular junior financial analyst skills
- Budgeting
- Financial analysis
- KPI management
- Data trending
- Critical thinking
- Financial modeling
- Microsoft Excel
- QuickBooks
- NetSuite
Sample junior financial analyst work experience bullet points
Providing high-level financial analytics based on KPIs and data trends is what you do best. Now show employers the impact you can make based on past experience.
Your ability to present information in a way that’s easy to understand should help you a lot in this part. A best practice for describing work experience is to make each bullet point under the listed job a quantifiable one-sentence statement of the impact you had.
Use numbers to guide hiring managers in understanding your top-notch financial background like these samples:
- Leveraged NetSuite to identify places in the company’s pricing structure that could be optimized to increase sales revenue by 32%.
- Developed and maintained charts and reports in Excel to make the budgeting process 40% more efficient.
- Ran and analyzed monthly risk reports to identify key places of product loss, which led to a 15% increase in net revenue.
- Used QuickBooks to conduct comparative financial analysis from month to month, which led to 34% more efficient spending.
Top 5 Tips for Your Junior Financial Analyst Resume
- A one-page resume is optimal
- You want your financial analyst resume to be concise and highly relevant to the position. Make sure to include key information like your budgeting or financial planning skills while cutting out any fluff that isn’t needed.
- Proper resume formatting
- Junior financial analysts will benefit from formatting resumes in reverse-chronological order. It puts your most recent experiences at the top, which will be the most relevant to your use of financial analytics systems.
- Emphasize key technical skills
- Financial analysis is a very technical process. Abilities in software like QuickBooks and NetSuite and technical capabilities like financial modeling should be emphasized throughout your resume to stand out to hiring managers.
- Junior analysts can benefit from including a resume objective
- A junior financial analyst job may be one of the first careers you’re trying to land after finishing college. In that case, a resume objective can help round out your skills by showing the value you can bring with core knowledge in aspects like financial planning and data trending.
- Thoroughly proofread your resume
- Accuracy matters in the financial field. Make sure your resume is represented in the same way by being free of grammar or spelling errors. It’s a good sign to hiring managers that you can manage the books with great attention to detail.
Try a resume template where you can add projects from college, or do your best to apply experience outside the field to the job’s requirements. For example, if you worked as a cashier for three years in college, you could mention how you never had any cash drawer shortages during that time, underscoring your financial accuracy.
Use your cover letter to fill in information you couldn’t fit on your resume. For example, you can explain why you’re passionate about the financial field or why you want to work for the specific company you’re applying to.
Since a junior financial analyst is typically an entry-level position, an objective will be better for most applicants. A best practice is to only use a resume summary if you have ten or more years of experience in the financial field where you want to sum up your key analytical skills.
