What Kind of Skills Do You Need to Start a Work-From-Home Career: Accounting, Business and Communication

Are you ready to launch a work-from-home career? Congratulations, you’ll be joining millions of people who currently work from home full-time or part-time. In 2015, the US Department of Labor estimated almost 25 percent of workers earn money with remote jobs.

A few more recent studies put the number higher, reporting somewhere around 42 – 50 percent of the US workforce telecommuting or operating a business from their homes.

Becoming your own boss, or even transitioning from a traditional employment arrangement to an off-site position can be a rewarding career shift. CCI Training Center campuses in Arlington and Dallas offer many career development courses for entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to update their business and accounting skills so they are fully prepared to run a successful business.

Three key pillars of career development are:

• Basic Accounting
• Communications
• Business process management

BASIC ACCOUNTING SKILLS

Some Dallas and Fort Worth entrepreneurs, and to a certain extent freelancers who want to work from home, don’t typically enjoy dealing with financial issues. Many already wear so many hats, they don’t invest the time or energy necessary to fully understand the financial side of their business.

Even if you plan to hire an accountant – some cannot justify the expense when they operate under a sole proprietorship arrangement – you still need to learn the ins-and-outs of operating a successful business. And, that includes gaining at least a basic understanding of financial reports.

Because a lack of understanding can lead to very expensive mistakes, CCI Training offers self-paced business and accounting courses specifically designed for entrepreneurs who have limited time and resources to invest in a traditional four-year college degree program.

While some students, especially those who identify themselves as visionaries more than bean counters, expect financial classes to be time consuming and hard. The reality is basic accounting principles are far easier to understand than you might think.

Accounting activities help you monitor how money comes into your business and goes out to employees, vendors, contractors and suppliers. Online basic accounting classes teach you how to organize transactions, allocate available resources and discover which products or services generate the highest profit margins.

CCI Training students who choose to add QuickBooks and Excel certification to their career development plan, also learn how to effectively compile, analyze and share financial reports with internal and external stakeholders.

COMMUNICATIONS

Effective communication impacts every aspect of your business from helping employees complete daily tasks to ordering supplies and talking to investors or bankers about start-up funding.

By the end of our communication course component, CCI Training Center students have gained the necessary knowledge and skills to communicate effectively during contract negotiations and customer conflict resolutions.

In fact, you’ll be fully prepared for every verbal and written business conversation that you encounter. The courses teach you about:

• Workplace communication
• Communicating in a team-based environment
• Overcoming barriers to effective communication
• Ethnic and cultural communication differences
• General terms and definitions
• Business writing for print and digital channels
• Designing and delivering business presentations, charts, graphs and proposals
• How to deliver good, bad, persuasive and neutral news to customers, employees and colleagues
• Differences in electronic, verbal and written communiques
• Resume writing
• Practicing active listening and reflective response techniques

Business Process Management

You may believe you possess all the essential attributes to become a successful entrepreneur, but if you don’t understand how a business operates, you are setting yourself up for failure before you even get started.

By casual definition, operating a business is a two-part structure: 1) offer services or products for a fee, and 2) get paid. There is so much more to running a successful business.

Professional development coursework is designed to give new business owners an understanding of basic business principles, functions and practices.

A strong vocational training business course explores:

• Creating and modifying business plans
• Funding and capital investments
• Allocating staff and financial resources wisely
• Ethical and social responsibility
• Customer service strategies
• Managing customer expectations
• Basic business processes/operations
• Workforce issues: hiring, training, onboarding, and retention
• Applying generally accepted accounting practices, such as posting transactions daily to monitor sales, cash flow, accounts payable and accounts receivable activities.
• Payroll
• Production and service delivery
• Budgeting/Forecasting
• Inventory control and internal supply chain management
• Compliance, permits and legal forms
• Marketing
• Establishing competitive prices

CCI Training’s vocational curriculum gives you a solid foundation for starting, and operating, your work-from-home enterprise. Gaining basic accounting, communication and business management skills positions you to enter the marketplace with confidence.

Learn more about our programs by dialing 972-846-8796 or complete our online inquiry form.