Top 15 Accounting Intern Skills for a Successful Career

This post provides important accounting intern skills to have and improve upon to excel on the job and build a successful accounting career.

If you are seeking an accounting intern position, you will need to develop certain skills and qualities to make it easier for you to get a placement with your favorite employer.

This post provides some of the important skills and qualities you need to have as someone seeking an accounting internship position, to enhance your success at getting a placement with employers.

Who is an Accounting Intern?

An accounting intern is a person who undergoes trainings in a real life organization in order to learn and gain first-hand experience of what accounting entails.

Such a person can serve as an auxiliary staff in an organization and help perform some duties like research, prepare financial reports and assist with reconciling accounts as needed.

To be effective working as an accounting intern and achieving success in your career, here are important skills and qualities to have:

Good communication skills
IT proficiency
Good mathematical skills
Motivation
High level of efficiency
Accuracy
Good personality
Willingness to take on new challenges
Multitasking
Administrative skills
Personal evaluation
Business interest
Organizational skills
Ability to manage deadlines
Methodological approach to work.

Good communication skills

This is one of the most important skills to have if you are working as an accounting intern and succeed in your career.

If you want to get into good accounting positions of your dream, you should consider good communication skills as important to develop.

You will need to be skilled in writing and speaking to succeed in an accounting career.

There are two forms of communication you will need to be good at.

You must be a graceful speaker as well as a good writer with clarity and unambiguity in meanings intended in your writing.

If you are good in communication, then you will make yourself a good channel through which information can flow in and around in your organization.

2. IT proficiency

Proficiency in IT is also a very important quality accounting interns need to have to be effective in their job and career.

You should therefore ensure you are knowledgeable in IT issues and are able to use common IT equipment and software packages commonly applied in accounting, like Excel.

These software packages are good and have the capacity to make your job easier.

3. Good mathematical skills

Mathematical skills are very important in accounting fields and are therefore required for the accounting intern position.

If you want to make a success of your accounting career, you need to be proficient in math, and that is why employers will want you to have the skills to be hired as an intern.

You sure know that accounting involves a lot of calculations and accuracy, which means that for you to have a good record of accuracy in your job, your mathematical skills should be really good.

4. Motivation

Motivation is your driving force that should keep you going in your accounting internship program.

You have to be excited by the prospect of making a good entry into the accounting world after your training.

This should be the beginning of happy days for you.

Motivation is a key skill to have as an accounting intern.

There is no doubt that at some point in your accounting career you might be discouraged. But when you feel that way, you have to quickly motivate yourself back to your feet.

It is important to be self-motivated as an accounting intern; this enables you to stay motivated all times, which increases your chances of achieving success in your accounting career.

5. High level of efficiency

Employers love interns that are so efficient in their job and leave little or no room for errors.

Having the quality of being efficient in what you do can significantly enhance your ratings with your employer as an accounting intern.

Mistakes abound sometimes in the process of carrying out your job but that should not be the norm overtime.

Repetitive mistakes and inability to match deadlines is a sign that you lack efficiency in whatever you have been assigned to do.

So, every day you have to work on your efficiency, i.e. you should be able to make little or no mistakes at all.

It is possible to be perfect in what you do; therefore, you should work towards been perfect in your accounting job.

Also, dealing with deadlines is another thing you should work on. Every job given has a timeframe within which if it not completed can cause some problems.

So, work on your speed of thought, and let that speed of thought match your speed of action.

6. Accuracy

This is one of the skills you must have to impress your employer in your work as an accounting intern.

In the field of accounting, whether at entry level or advanced level roles, accuracy is what whoever wants to employ you must be sure you can achieve always.

So, as you work on your speed of thought, you should also make sure you work on your accuracy.

As much as speed and matching of deadlines are important, yet they are not as important as the accuracy expected to be associated with your work.

Now, to increase your accuracy, you should be able to keep your focus and concentration in check.

You cannot be battling with distractions and expect to produce a quality work.

Accuracy is not possible if you don’t have the ability to keep your focus.

7. Good personality

Do you know that your personality is as important as your certification?

Your personality says a lot about what you can do and what should be expected from you as an accounting intern.

There is no way you can leave out the importance of having good personality if you so desire to build a career in accounting.

Being responsible entails the presence of some good traits which are necessary for you to be in any accounting job.

These traits include honesty, patience, and resilience. These traits should be seen and proven to be part of you.

Then also, responsibility entails your ability to do your job with utmost professionalism.

It is not just doing the job but doing it with so much professionalism and good work ethics.

You need to know this and quickly too. You shouldn’t be identified with a bad personality.

8. Willingness to take on new challenges

The way to the top of the ladder in the accounting field is filled with obstacles and challenges.

To build a successful career in the accounting profession requires a lot of mental and physical energy.

Accounting interns looking to build a successful career are expected to have strong willingness to take on challenges and proffer solutions.

9. Multitasking

Accounting students doing internship can also warm their way into employers’ hearts by showing that they are multitasking.

The ability to do various tasks at the same time is important for success in the accounting career, so if you don’t already have this skill, you should work on developing it quickly.

Multitasking skills will help you handle a good number of jobs smoothly without making mistakes.

There is no way you will succeed in any accounting field after training without developing the ability to handle some other related tasks.

Multitasking is similar to versatility because both involve handling a lot of tasks.

10. Administrative skills

Administration is what ensures that activities and appointments are carried out to the letter.

Activities are drawn up to make sure that there is a smooth running of the organization and so anyone coming in any position of accounting, including as an intern should see this skill as a good one to have.

Looking at it critically, you need this skill first for your personal development.

As you move higher in your accounting career, you might be required to work in an administrative position.

You wouldn’t turn down a job simply because it is not 100% accounting base, would you?

So, as you improve your skills in accounting, also try to improve your administrative skills, they will be useful to you in your work as an intern and in your accounting career in the future.

11. Personal evaluation

Personal evaluation is a useful skill accounting interns should develop.

Sometimes, you can be so caught up in activities that you might mistake activities for productivity.

Sometimes, it just doesn’t work that way. You have to be sure that you are really making progress in your job.

Don’t allow your boss to be the one to do the evaluation, it could be damning and discouraging, leaving you with little or no chance to correct your mistakes.

But with personal evaluation, you should be able to know your mistakes and know where to make some improvements.

Make sure that you do this regularly and give no space for laxity.

This is just what you have to do for yourself; evaluate yourself and know whether you are meeting expectations and being efficient and effective in your accounting job.

12. Business interest

Students with some business skills are better prepared for the accounting career.

One of the things you can offer your employer is some good and workable business ideas to help boost the fortunes of the organization.

As an accounting student, you are encouraged to stay abreast with some good business ideas and with realities in the marketplace.

It is in your best interest if you can do so. You need to get to the top, and your boss can be a good ladder for that if you can offer some business advice.

13. Organizational skills

Organization is a good ability to have to be successful in an accounting intern position.

Through your accounting training, you should also learn to be a good organizer.

You should learn to have some good way of putting things together and making sure that under your watch things don’t go wrong.

Organizational skill helps you stay in control of activities around you.

If you can put activities around you under control, it means you have some good organizational skills to boast of.

Don’t lose control of activities and don’t fail to plan on how the activities should go.

Arrangement and making of schedules and fixing up of appointments and ensuring that duty roasters are well prepared and documented are duties that you may be assigned as an accounting intern, which you will be expected to do effectively.

14. Ability to manage deadlines

In a fast-paced business world as the one we have today, it is important to know that everything is time bound.

That is to say that for everything that needs to be done, there is a time allotted to it. Beyond that timeframe, there could be dire consequences.

So, what does this mean to you as an accounting intern?

Simply put, you don’t have all the time in the world to accomplish the different tasks assigned to you.

You need to understand that nobody has time to waste, not even your boss, and time mismanagement is sure to be something that can put you in a bad light.

Having this in mind, you need to improve in your efficiency and speed of delivery of service.

If you truly want to succeed in any accounting job, then you have to bear it in mind that you have to learn to work with deadlines.

You must do away with anything that wastes your time.

15. Methodological approach to work

Doing a job without a clear strategy is like having a sports team playing without a tactic. This you know can be counterproductive.

There should be a clear methodology or strategy which you employ in order to do your accounting job well as an intern.

This strategy or methodology can be made available to you through the organization (maybe through a documentation of your job description) or maybe you can develop one for yourself, either way, be sure to have a clear path to your job.

When you have a good methodological approach to your job, it will help you get accustomed to it and help you to also adapt to new changes without much fuss and waste of time.

Accounting Intern Skills for Resume

A resume or CV for the accounting intern role will be more impactful on the employer/recruiter with a compelling Skills Section.

A Skills Section that shows that the candidate has the skills and qualities that can enable them to be successful on the accounting intern job will be more effective in getting an interview invitation from the employer/recruiter.

You can create such Skills Section for your accounting intern resume or CV by applying some of the skills and qualities presented above if you have them.

Conclusion

This article has presented some of the major skills and qualities you need to have to succeed in your accounting intern job and generally in your career, so go ahead to develop them.

Who is an Accounting Intern?