All of us have encountered this many times over – you read a job posting for a CFO or Controller position (this is particularly true about recruitment agencies' ads) and the responsibilities list is a perfect match to your experience: you've done budgeting, forecasting, treasury management, BOD reporting; you've designed KPI's and dashboards; you've managed and trained staff, etc… Then, you get to the end and among mandatory qualifications you see: real estate experience (or broker/dealer, or manufacturing, or consumer products… whatever) "is a must."
Why? Do hiring execs and managers think that there are some cult secrets separating one industry's accounting and finance from another? That you can only absorb them through exclusive involvement with that industry's firms? That no one with deep knowledge of fundamental principles of finance, GAAP, taxation etc. can adapt them to a new industry and quickly digest the technical specifics?
And wouldn't they be more interested in hiring someone sophisticated enough to be willing and capable of diversifying their experience? Do they really think that someone who knows Revenue Recognition Cycle in Technology will not be able to dissect standards for the same task in Financial Services?
I can go on forever with these questions, but I guess you get my point: I don't think that industry experience is relevant for REAL CFO's and Controllers – those who possess broad and deep knowledge of accounting and finance, not just few repetitious tricks they have learned without understanding the underlying principles behind them.
Let me give you a simple analogy. Multi-lingual children exposed to different languages through their residence, parental ethnicity, foreign nannies, etc. are known to add more and more languages to their arsenal with a greater success than their peers. The reason is that their anatomical speech instruments become very flexible and can adapt to any new challenges.
The same is true about the professional expertise of those financial execs who were exposed throughout their career to a variety of industrial and organizational specifics. They usually have deeper understanding of business, sharper commercial acumen and ability to adapt them to any new circumstances.
In yet another excerpt from Marc Cenedella's TheLadders book (Sell Yourself Short), he condecsends that recruiters are now more open to industry crossovers, but that you will have to accept lower salaries and positions.
First of all, the supposed "openness" is a lie: the job listings are full of specific industry requirements. Secondly, don't let statements like that lower your self-esteem: if you are capable to cross over without difficulties, it's your asset, not a shortcoming.
Let's not forget that the system of double-bookkeeping (still the foundation of all accounting the last time I checked) was created by the XIV century Venetian sea merchants and first outlined in proper structural manner by Benedetto Cotrugli around 1450 as a chapter in his "Of Trading and the Perfect Trader." Subsequently, Lucas Bartolomes Pacioli devoted 36 chapters to the subject in his monumental tretese on mathematics.
These were Renaissance men who also wrote on architecture, medicine, law, art, religion and broad business issues. It is unfortunate that the employers of today have devolved to preferring the narrow specialization instead.
The Frustrated CFO 