Selecting the Best Online Training Platform for Your Finance Team

Redefining Finance Teams in the Digital Era

The digital revolution has transformed the way businesses must operate and introduced opportunities and challenges for corporate finance teams. As a result, finance leaders face mounting pressure to shift their teams beyond number-crunching to data-driven strategic business advisors.

Meanwhile, new artificial intelligence and automation tools promise to streamline and automate many routine finance tasks. As a result, team members should gain time back to focus on higher-value analysis and decision-making. However, a finance industry skill gap prevents many finance teams from fully benefiting, hindering this transformation.

Leaders must provide targeted training to successfully transform teams. For many, replacing or supplementing traditional training programs with online learning platforms makes sense. A learning platform can equip teams with fundamental and advanced financial expertise, efficiently upskill and reskill current team members, and onboarding new hires. For hybrid or remote teams, they can establish a shared baseline of knowledge and learning resources.

The multitude of online courses and learning solutions can make the evaluation process seem daunting. Not all online learning platforms are alike. For finance teams, the best online learning platforms offer certain essential features – here are seven to keep in mind:

Targeted Training for Specific Skill Needs

A one-size-fits-all approach is no longer suitable for modern corporate finance training. Along with fundamentals, finance teams need online self-paced course offerings and learning tools for advanced and specialized finance and analytical capabilities aligned to their employer’s business needs. The best online learning platforms enable focused skill-building for maximum impact.

As online learning for finance teams becomes more sophisticated and tailored, an online learning platform that quickly onboard, upskills, and reskills employees is most valuable.

Engaging, High-Quality Learning Content

The best online learning platforms for corporate finance teams offer comprehensive, self-paced training in an interactive format.

Online courses should cover finance competencies, such as accounting and financial modeling, to valuable skills like data science and business intelligence. Look for engaging learning tools like realistic exercises, case studies, hands-on exercises, and community discussion forums.

The best online learning platforms enhance retention and application better than passive learning models. In addition, an online learning platform that offers completion certificates and specialization programs will drive higher employee engagement and increased mastery, resulting in highly skilled teams.

Experts Teaching Real-World Skills 

An effective online learning platform should prioritize job-relevant skill development. When experienced finance professionals create courses, they infuse materials with real-world expertise and best practices that use realistic exercises, case studies, and simulations reflecting daily work scenarios.

Expert-led curriculum and instruction align closely with finance team goals, required technical skills, and professional development, such as leadership, communication, and team development.

An online learning platform offering a competency-based approach, emphasizing practical real-world application. The best online learning platform for your team should deliver significant workplace impact.

Role-Based Learning Paths

Effective online learning platforms offer role-based learning paths tailored to specific finance job functions, equipping employees with precise job-related knowledge and competencies. This model reduces the need for colleagues and team leaders to provide individual training. It empowers learners to take control of their development by pursuing specialized training aligned with their goals, skills gaps, and career aspirations.

Your online learning platform should provide role-specific course offerings and specialization and certification programs, allowing team members to become experts in their domains.

Advanced Training in High-Demand Skills

Modern finance teams require robust financial modeling and analytical skills to extract strategic insights from the growing volume of data. In today’s business environment, a chief financial officer expects their finance team to go beyond budgeting and forecasting to contributing data-driven insights and creating more value.

These heightened expectations mean finance teams must build the advanced skills essential for interpreting complex data and improving financial accounting, forecasting, planning, and performance management.

The best online learning platforms enable your team to develop valuable skills in financial modeling and analytics, data science, and business intelligence, among others. They continuously create courses with new and fresh content as finance roles and skills evolve.

Progress Tracking and Results Reporting

After your team engages with course content and learning materials, you need to ensure they’ve met learning objectives. Your learning platform should offer tools for skill assessments, hands-on challenges, practical exercises, and completion certificates to validate learning. This active approach enables training refinement based on their needs.

Seek an online learning platform with admin dashboards to manage online courses and monitor team progress through course materials or learning paths. Admin dashboards also help track employee course completion, assessments, and certifications.

Strong reporting is crucial for ROI and impact assessment, and the best online learning platform for your team will help you identify competency gaps and strengths across your team.

Maximizing Training Impact and ROI

The best online learning platforms reduce overall training costs and cost-per-learner by offering anytime, anywhere training and scalability across distributed finance teams. Choose a unified online learning platform that provides economies of scale to maximize learning platform ROI and transform your finance team into strategic advisors for growth.

For example, one of our finance team customers applied his online learning to transform the way his team conducted financial planning and analysis (FP&A). Soon afterward, his business reported annual revenue growth of 40% and operating profit growth of 165%. That’s the type of positive impact the right online training platform can provide to businesses.

Empowering Finance Teams with the Right Learning Platform

Finance teams must evolve and learn new skills to remain competitive and relevant. Whether you’re a chief financial officer or a team leader, your team’s transformation into strategic business partners starts with the right online learning platform.

By carefully evaluating online learning platforms, finance leaders can empower their teams to meet changing expectations and demands, ultimately driving business growth and success.

CFI for Teams

If you’re ready to empower your finance team with online training, we can help. CFI for Teams offers specialized training courses and certification programs for finance teams. No matter the needs of your organization, we can equip your team with the skills they need to reach their full potential.

Additional Resources

FP&A at the Forefront (Part 1): FP&A’s Evolution and Critical Skills For Success

Why Online Training for Finance Teams Makes Sense

Building Perspective Beyond Dollars & Cents

Employee Development in Finance

See all management & strategy resources

See all team development resources