5 ways to build strategic thinking skills (cheaply)

A recent Robert Half Management survey reported that “86 percent of CFOs said strategic-thinking abilities are important for accounting and finance professionals — 30 percent of those interviewed feel they are mandatory. Yet nearly half (46 percent) of executives said their organization does not provide related professional development opportunities.”

So what is an eager Auditor to do if they want to develop their strategic thinking skills but find themselves working at an organization that does not formally provide the opportunities to do so? Here are five ways for a plucky auditor to build their skills on the cheap. Each of these courses will bolster your ability to develop careful plans for achieving goals over a long period of time (a.k.a. strategy, baby!):

1. Attend a Start Up Weekend event near you and learn what it really takes to start a company. Work closely with people with different skill sets (Marketing, Operations, IT, Sales, etc.) and learn how they think. Wow them with your own technical expertise and mastery of Excel. There is no need to pitch a business unless you want to; supportive team members are in big demand. In one weekend, you will get a quick and dirty understanding of what it takes two years to cover in an MBA program. The cost is $99 for non-technical (that’s you unless you also know how to code).
2. Complete Coursera’s six course series on Unlocking Value in Massive Datasets. It was created by UC San Diego and Splunk. Build the skills to understand big data and what insights big data can provide through hands-on experience with the tools and systems used by big data scientists and engineers. Knowing how to use big data will add some serious power to your audit findings and recommendations. After taking this class, volunteer to help out a fellow auditor by providing data analysis for their audit. The six course package is $453, though individual courses cost between $59 and $89.
3. Learn how to tell the stories of your audit findings in Ideo’sStorytelling for Influence course. The best audit reports tell a story that persuades stakeholders to act. Storytelling skills will help you create a larger strategic impact inside your organization. A warning though: you will not be satisfied with your audit team’s boring report format after taking this course. But that’s okay as it sucks and needs to be overhauled anyway. Volunteer to do that. This course costs $399.
4. +Acumen and Bain teamed up to develop a course on Scaling Smart: Developing Repeatable Models to Grow Your Impact. The course will teach you how to identify your organization’s core strengths and build upon them strategically, how to grow in diverse and hard-to-reach markets, and how to achieve “good scale” and steer clear of “bad scale.” Imagine how much more useful your audit recommendation could be if they factored in what your organization needed to do to remain successful over the long term. This is a free course but you should take it with a little team, so you will need to convince a couple pals to join you.
5. Internal Audit reports up to the Board and the Audit Committee, but how much do you really understand about what they do? +Acumen and Accion developed the Board Strategy for Social Enterprise course that will fill in the blanks for you. Things like the role that boards play in providing corporate governance and being able to identify and distinguish between board structures. This is a free course but you should take it with a little team, so you will need to convince a couple pals to join you.

If you do pursue any of these, don’t be shy. Be sure to mention it to your boss and keep them posted on how it is going.

A version of this story originally appeared on Audit Moose.