Welcome back to Count Me In. Today, I'm excited to welcome back Brian Hock, founder and CEO of Hock International. If you caught our last episode together, you know Brian's a leading voice in professional certifications. This time, we're taking things a step further, exploring not just the value of certifications like the CMA, but why applying what you've learned is crucial for career growth. Brian shares candid insight into how certifications can and should align with your current role and future ambitions, emphasizing that collecting credentials isn't enough if you're not using them to deliver results on the job.

We also talk about how continuous learning, expanding communication skills, and proactive networking are key drivers in securing promotions and moving up the organizational ladder. So whether you're just getting your foot in the door or aiming your next big career move, Brian's advice will help you make the most of hard earned knowledge and set yourself apart for long term success. Well, Brian, we're really excited to have you back on Count Me In. Last time you were here, we talked about the importance of certifications. So today we're going to start talking about certifications, kind of just the beginning.

So maybe you can elaborate a little bit why it's crucial to apply what they've learned rather than just attaining the certification.

Well, thanks, Adam. It's great to be back and continue the discussion really that we had last time. And I think when we talk about the value of certifications, there's absolutely great value in certifications and what it does for a person in their career. But we have to remember that ultimately we have to do our job, and we have to do our job well. You can have all the certifications in the world, but if you can't show up for work and actually do what your company is expecting you to do, you're not going have a real long time of employment there.

And so what we're looking at with the certification is essentially making certain that what we learn in the certification lines up with what it is that we're doing at work. And that knowledge, the tools, the skills that we get from the certification are going to help us do what it is that we're supposed to do at work. And so it's that knowledge that ultimately is going to help us do our job well, which is ultimately what's going to lead to the promotion and the other opportunities and having those growth opportunities as we go through our career.

So when we look at certifications like the CMA, how do those how do these certifications help a professional in their day to day job within the organization?

Well, they help if they're lined up with what it is that the person is doing. So I think when we look at certifications, there's kind of I mean, we can categorize them in many different ways, but I'm going to put them into two categories. One is kind of a more general foundational certification, and then the others are very specific later in your career when you become a specialist certifications. And there are more certifications than we know about, because if you get into corporate finance, there's certifications that are very specific. If you're in treasury management, there's certifications that are very specific.

And so as you go through your career and you become a specialist, you get that in-depth knowledge in a topic, there are probably certifications that are very closely aligned to that specialty knowledge or specialty service that you're providing. But with CMA, this is what I would call a more of a general certification in that it covers the skills that you need in accounting and finance. If you're being hired to be a specific treasury management person for a large organization, CMA's probably not giving you the knowledge that you need for that specific job. But if you take that person and go back in their career ten years, when they were starting in the finance function, that's where those kind of general skills that come in CMA. And so what CMA does, and I think it does it probably better than any certification out there, is that it provides accounting and finance reality based skills.

What it is that an accounting professional, a finance professional is going to be expected to do in the first handful of years of their career. And with that knowledge, they're able to do their job, but also understand how that individual job fits into the organization as a whole. You know, you write a report and that report goes somewhere, and the person you send that report to is making a decision. They're taking your information and combining it with the information that three other people send them and putting that into another report that goes on. And if we understand what it is that is being done with the information we're creating, we may be able to present it in a slightly better way for the person who's using it.

We may realize that, oh, there's some more information that we should include in this. This has most of the information that's needed, but with all the data that companies are collecting these days, it may be that there's information available that wasn't two years ago when this form was created or this report was created. So if we have that knowledge, not only about our specific job, but what the company is doing, how our job fits into what the company is doing, we're able to do our job better. We're able to help our customer, even if it's an internal customer, the person who's using the work that we do, we're going to help them do their job better. And that's how we get promoted.

That's how we get those opportunities when we perform not just our task, but we understand what that task is to the larger organization.

Well, and that's pertinent. Like you said, you want to keep your job rather than just get one, right? So there's so many elements that you have to do. And, you know, and when you're just starting out, you're kind of you're not sure of the landscape of what your roles and responsibilities are going to be, you know? So what would you what would you say to somebody who is, you know, they've been in their job for a little bit?

They see the CMA as a as a place to get a bunch of knowledge. It may not necessarily line up perfectly, but they see, you know, is that still is that still a way for them to kind of expand their knowledge and possibly get promoted as well?

Absolutely. I think with certifications, we need to make certain that when we choose a certification, we're not looking at what we do today, but we look at what our next step is. And part of that is because it's going to take time to get the certification. Now, it might be six months, it might be eighteen months, it might be two years, but we want to make certain that what we're learning isn't going to help us in the past, but is going to help us in the future. And so if you go into the company and you've been working for a couple of years and you're, I know, accounts payable or whatever narrow niche you're working in that company, and you say, Hey, I want to get promoted.

Well, to be promoted you can't just be aware of accounts payable. You need to understand a little bit more than that. As you go up in the organization, your area of responsibility or knowledge gets broader. You know, the person who just gets hired out of university and they spend forty hours a week doing one specific thing. Well, when you get promoted, you supervise that job plus seven other one specific thing jobs that you didn't do yourself.

But we need to make certain that we're going to have the skills, the knowledge to do that next step. And so when the company says, oh, we need to promote somebody into this next supervisory level or whatever the case may be, we've demonstrated, A, we can do the job we're doing ourselves right now very well because they're never going to promote somebody who can't do their own job well. We can do our job well, and because we've gone through the certification process, because we have this next level of knowledge, we're the one that's best equipped to move out of just our specific area and supervise, be involved in other areas as well. And so it's the whole process of certifications need to be forward looking. Yeah.

And not what I'm doing, and I understand if you're going to be in that position for a few years, you may need to do some training, you may need to get some certification at that point, but in general, we want to be looking at where do I want to be in three years, two years? And what is the certification that's required for that job? What is the knowledge that is required for that job? And then how is it that I get that knowledge? And it's not only certifications, part of it is also being proactive at work.

Anytime there's a team or they're putting together a group to discuss something, be a part of it. Yeah. Don't just stay and say, I'm going to do my job and that's it. Well, you need to, we talk, I think a lot of times people think of networking as outside the organization. If you're in a large enough organization, there's a necessity to network inside the organization so that the people who make these decisions about promotions and opportunities know who you are.

And so anytime there's that opportunity in the organization to work with people from a different department or be involved in some project that's larger than just what you do yourself every day, volunteer. That's your opportunity to demonstrate you're capable of doing more than you're doing right now.

Well, it also shows that you can work with a cross functional team, that you can work outside of your department, and that's a big win for yourself in your growth, but also showing the organization, Hey, you're willing to work with other teams and you don't want to stay in your silo because we get stuck in a silo and it's hard to get out of it sometimes.

Well, and it's also when you started talking about, you know, work with other people, it's communication. Yeah. And so many young career people, when they're starting their careers, I think fail to realize important communication skills are. And that's in person communication skills, it's in a report, it's in an email, just how it is that you're able to communicate what you know to other people. Because if you know everything in the world, but you can't communicate it to somebody else, it's useless.

And so, people, as they start their careers, need to take every opportunity to practice communication skills, and that starts, I mean, the importance of communication skills starts in the interview. And at your first interview out of university and twenty years into your career, every interview is, in a sense, a test of your communication skills.

Yeah, it really is. You know, what how does how does continuing education tie into this? Because, know, most certifications like the CMA, you have to get a certain amount of continuing professional education credits each year. How does that tie in to continue your knowledge? Because obviously, you know, the the information you learn for a certification is is set, you know, and it's very difficult.

You know, they they only update it every once in a while. But things are constantly changing, so you have to keep up your knowledge.

And that's what continuing education is. And if you're working, if you have a job, even if you don't have a certification, you need to do continuing education. It may not have that name and we may not recognize it as continuing education, but if we just take the last two years with AI, and all of the different tools and everything that's been about AI, if you have not learned anything about it, you're not going to have a job for very long.

Yeah.

I'm not saying you need to be able to program it and you need to be able to write the next ChatGPT yourself, but these are tools that you need to know how to use. And one of the ways of looking at ChatGPT and also the larger continuing education is even to look at Excel. When I graduated thirty years ago, on my CV, I put, I had word processing and spreadsheet knowledge because that was kind of unusual. Not everybody did. We didn't have computers in every classroom and there was a computer lab at the university and you had to reserve time on it.

And so if you go back thirty years, at that point Excel may not have even been Excel, it might have been Lotus one, two, three, whatever it was, but those skills that you needed back then were just formulas. If you could add up a column with a formula, you were ahead. You were, you were an advanced user. Yeah. But even if we just look at what's happened in Excel in the past five years, the ten years, the tools that it has, the power that it has, you need to be able to use that.

And so if you're in an interview and they say, What can you do in Excel? And you say, I can add up a column, that's not going work. You're not going to get that job. And so even as we just look at technology, there's a need for continuing education, because you have to continue to learn what technology is able to do for you. And the same is true with your accounting, your finance, communication skills, all of that changes, and we need to stay current with it.

Even if it's being aware of the language, you're having lunch with somebody and they say something. If we at least know what it is that they're talking about and are able to make a semi intelligent comment about it, that's important. Because if you're talking to people at work and you're not aware of what's being done in the profession, you're not aware of what's happening with technology, you're not aware of what the company itself is doing and how it's implementing these things, you're not going to be there very long. And so the nice thing about a certification is it requires that continuing education. An even better example of the need for continuing education, and this isn't CMA, but tax.

You know, if you pass a tax exam, well, months later what you studied on the tax exam is not all correct anymore. Tax codes change all the time. And so if you're a tax person and you don't do continuing education, you're not going have any clients Because when you give advice based on when you passed the exam four years ago, everybody you talk to is going to say, Oh, you know, I'm going to find somebody who's passed the exam more recently than that. And so, it's an absolute fundamental part, and this is kind of forced upskilling for an individual when you have a certification. You have to do it in order to maintain that certification.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I want to circle back. You mentioned communication, how important that is. You know, how do you prepare for like real world communication challenges? Because you can read a book and understand and take a test, but being able to communicate it with others and be able to communicate those concepts is not the easiest thing for every person.

And do you have any advice for folks who are trying to improve upon that? Practice.

And it's something that and I know this we don't want to say we do this or but to some extent it's practice in front of a mirror. You know, if you're going to an interview we'll start at the early stages of your career, if you're going to an interview, you know some of the questions they're going to ask, or variations on a theme of what they're going to ask. So you should have an idea of how you want to answer that question. You should have an idea of how you're going to answer the question. What are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses? What is something you struggle doing? Where's a time you showed leadership opportunity? And so practice and think about what is going to happen. I always say anytime you send an email, think about what question is this person going to ask based off of this email, what are they going to ask?

And why don't I just answer that question now instead of make them ask it and then I have to answer again? And that's the same thing when you give a report to somebody, when you go and talk to your supervisor and they're going to discuss the project or whatever. Think, what are the questions that they're going to ask? What are the things that I need to be prepared? And then you can practice a little bit.

You know, you have in mind, well, these are the three most important things, this is what we need more resources for, this is the person who's not doing what they need to be doing or not getting us the information. But if we prepare and just think about what might be the question we get, we're able to kind of mentally put together an answer before we're sitting in the room and the person is looking at us and asks us that question. You know, mentioned earlier participate in whatever project or team your company is putting together. Practice or take that opportunity to be the speaker. If you're at university and you have a group project and somebody needs to present it to the class, be that person.

Raise your hand, say I want to be that person. When there's any opportunity to ask a question of a speaker, to introduce a speaker, do it. Take that opportunity. It's better to mess up, to forget the words when you're at university and you're never going to see those people after two more years than to do that at work. And so whatever at work, any opportunities to be the speaker, to make the presentation, do it.

And practice makes perfect, and they say you need to have ten thousand hours to become an expert at something. Well, I don't know that many people get to ten thousand hours of public speaking, but you still need to take those opportunities because without taking those opportunities, you won't practice and there won't be any improvement. And so I know that's kind of an easy answer, to do it more, but I think that the problem is people who don't like to do it don't volunteer to do it, and try to find every opportunity not to do it. When in reality, at the early stages of your career, you need to make certain you're making progress in that direction, at least, because there is a point where you won't get a promotion because you aren't able to communicate. Once your job becomes outward facing, and you start talking to the clients, you start talking to your suppliers, you start talking to the bank, when you start presenting, representing your company to people outside the organization, if you can't speak well, if you can't present yourself and the organization well, you're not going to get that job because you're not able to do that communication that the company wants.

And so, like just about anything else, practice, practice, practice, and take every opportunity you can to start communicating.

Yeah. Well, and the more you practice, the more you'll learn to be able to think on your feet and be able to answer. So let's say you've practiced a bunch of questions because you think those are questions and somebody asks a different question. It might be slightly related, but being able to formulate an answer is not the easiest thing. But the more you practice, the more you understand, the more knowledge you have, the more you can tap into those things as you're providing those answers and you'll sound coherent.

And as you as you get that experience, there's less time required to prepare. Yes. Because you've heard all the questions. You've heard the questions before. You know what they are.

You've answered that question. As you said, thinking on your feet, I think, is kind of an overlooked ability to be able to hear a conversation, have somebody ask a question that you're not expecting, and it's just kind of completely unexpected. But being able to take a breath, pause for a moment, sort through, you know, all these past conversations and questions you've answered and find something that's relevant, that doesn't happen accidentally. You look at people and you say, wow, that's a great speaker, they were captivating, I listened the whole time, it was engaging. That didn't happen accidentally.

That person, even if naturally, I mean, people naturally are more outgoing or more happy to do that, But everybody you listen to who you say, Wow, that was a really good speech, a really good speaker, didn't happen accidentally. They put in the time and the effort and the practice to be able to do what it is that they're doing so well.

Yeah, they do. Well, and also, don't want to make people think by listening to this, if you practice practice, you'll always have every answer. It is okay to say, You know what? Let me get back to you on that.

I cannot agree with that more. I think that one of the best things you can say to help your career is to say, I don't know. Now, I'm going to add a word to that phrase, but there's nothing worse, I think, than people who say they can do something, or essentially exaggerate their abilities or their experiences, because people will find out that you can't do it. And so when you say, Yes, I can do that, or Yes, I'll and you think you know everything, you don't. But I said the phrase I don't know.

We need to change that because I don't know, if somebody asks you to do something and you say, I don't know how to do that, that's kind of the end of the conversation, and that's not where we want the conversation to end because you just failed that person. They asked you to do something, you said, I can't do it, and that's the end. But if we put one word at the end of that, if we say, I don't know how to do that yet, but I'd like to learn. I want to learn how to do that. Can you show me where?

Can you point me in the right direction? Is there a person I should ask? If you acknowledge, I don't know how to do that, but I'm going to learn for you. I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm going to find out. I don't know who the best person to contact is yet, but I'm going to talk to some people and I'm going to come back to you and give you that answer.

And so it's a matter of being honest about what we know and what we don't know, but then those things that we don't know, saying, hey, I'm going to take it on myself to learn that, to find that out, to get that information for you, whatever the case may be. And so we're managing expectations and we're also showing to that person, I'm going to help you out. I'm going to take it on myself to learn that information, to whatever it is that we're trying to do, and get that to you. And that's a great opportunity to show the people in your organization that you're somebody they want to work with. That's the person I want to work with because if they don't know it, they'll tell me, and they're willing to learn.

You know, those are the people you want to work with.

Yeah. And it also shows that you're able that you're willing to go above and beyond what you already what you're already doing. That that's that's his volumes to the people you're working with.

I I just kind of disconnected thought a little bit, but people promoted. And so what we've been talking about are really some of the things you have to do to get promoted. You have to be able to communicate, work on a team, and all of those things. But one of the things that we forget about if we want to get promoted is there needs to be somebody to do our job after we get promoted. And so part of working to get promoted is essentially preparing your replacement.

I know people don't want to do this a lot of times because why would I train a person to do my job so they fire me? Well, we're not trying to get fired out of this, but when that job comes up, that promotion comes up, I want whoever is making that decision to look and say, Wow, Brian does a great job. Brian would be wonderful in this position. And, you know, I was talking to Brian, he's actually taken the time to make certain there's somebody who's learning his job already, so we can promote Brian and Adam's just going to slide nicely in his place and be ready to take over for Brian. So we're not even going to have a problem replacing Brian.

And so we always kind of think up the organizational chart for us, and that's what we want to do, But at the same time, we need to be working to keep the people that are going to replace us able to replace us. And so we're learning, and at the same time, we need to be teaching so that we're able to be promoted because there's somebody who's able to slide into our position as we go up the ladder.

Yeah, I think it was John Maxwell famously says, you know, in his leadership books that great leaders are the ones who raise up everyone around them. So, when they go up, everybody around them raises up as well. I, you know, it's a it's it's again, it's starts not getting stuck in our silos and actually broadening out beyond what we're already doing.

Well, it's it's one of those things too. You see all the the posts on LinkedIn and about teamwork and and things like that. And you your success, you will be more successful if your success helps other people succeed as But if your whole goal is, I'm going to get promoted, if it's all about you, that may work up to a certain point in the organization, but if it's I'm going to help the organization be better, and I'm going to help the people around me be better, and the other thing too is how you want to hire people, you want to work with people smarter than you. And that's very difficult because we're nervous and anxious that we're not going to be the smartest person in the room, but as you go up in the organization, you really want the people around you to be the smartest in their areas, And that requires a lot of personal, kind of, don't know, self control is the right word, but comfort in who you are to say, I don't know the answer to that. I need to get somebody who's an expert to provide the guidance and the counsel that we need.

But again, it's not just me succeeding. We need to help the whole organization succeed at the same time.

Yeah. So, we've definitely we've laid out a number of reasons, you know, in the importance of applying what you've learned in certifications, you know, and somebody may be listening to this and thinking, you know, how like, I'm not I'm not really sure if a certification is right for me. And what would you say to them, you know, if they they listen to this whole conversation and they're still saying that?

Well, I don't necessarily think that for every person at every time in their career, certification is the answer to what they need. I know I've talked to people that once they get one certification, they want to get another one and then another one. And I say, time out. Your career is not collecting certifications. Your career is performing a job in accounting, finance, whatever it is.

And so at times you need to not study for a certification, but actually do what it is that you've learned how to do and to do your job well. But I think the way I look at a certification is that it's a very structured way to learn what you need to learn for a certain job, or a certain role, or a certain responsibility. And sure, we can go out into YouTube and LinkedIn Learning and whatever, all the different courses, and we can learn from different places all of the topics that are on an exam. I mean, it may take longer and it's not terribly efficient, but one of the things that a certification does is it very quickly communicates to somebody else what we know. The example I give is university.

You went to a university and maybe your university is the best university in the region, in the country, whatever the case is, but you go to the next country, the next part of the world, nobody's ever heard of your university. Nobody knows if it was a good university, bad university, an actual university, or you just printed out a fancy looking diploma. Nobody knows. But if you say I'm a CMA, everybody can find out what you know. There's a standardized syllabus, there's a pass rate, there's a pass mark, and anybody can find out what you know.

And so one of the questions we get a lot is, will a certification guarantee that I get a job? Well, first of all, no it won't, because you still have to go through an interview, and if you show up late for the interview, you're rude to the person interviewing you, it doesn't matter how many certifications you have. But also, will a certification help me get a job is the wrong question. Yes, it will help you get a job because it will help you get the interview. You know, you meet the requirements, the person's looking for whatever the case may be.

But ultimately the question we want to ask about our certification is, will it help me keep my job and do my job well and get promoted? Which comes back to, you want the certification to give you the skills to do the job you're doing, or the job you want to be doing, to prepare for that. And so when somebody's looking and trying to decide should they get a certification, they need to ask, the job that I have, do I have the skills I need to do it? The job that I want to be at in two years, do I have the skills, the knowledge that I need to do that job in two years? And if the answer to that is no, well you need to solve that problem.

There's a gap between where you are and where you need to be. And in a lot of cases, that certification is the easiest way to solve that gap. It's an easy way to do it, it's a structured way to do it, and then after you've done it, you can say, I'm a CMA. I know the skills that are needed for this job. If you go to an interview and they say, Well, this job is in the accounting function, what do you know about accounting?

And you say, I'm a CMA. And you'd say, More than that, but you've proven the point, you've checked that box. If you say, Well, I've done 73 online courses, and the person, they don't know what course, who was the person, what were the topics, maybe you did the same course 73 times from 73 different people. And so certifications are that very direct, standard way of demonstrating what it is that you know. And now, as you go through your career, as I said earlier, you're going to have different certifications.

And so if you take your university group, and there's 30 of you, it may be that 20 of you did CMA, but if you take those people fifteen years later, all 20 of them did some different certification. Because CMA is that good foundational certification, but after five years and some of you are in treasury management, some of you are in corporate finance, somebody's in internal audit, somebody's in logistics, whatever, there are different certifications for each of those specialties. So certifications help us do our job. They help us do our job well. And there are times when we need a certification to take that next step in our career.

And there are also times we just need to say, okay, I'm going to focus on work and I'm going to do my work better than anybody's ever done it in this position. I'm going to get the promotion and then I'm going to take that next certification to help me get the next promotion after that.

Wow. Well, Brian, I think that's a great way to sum things up. I really appreciate you coming back on the podcast, and we love having you This

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