What IT Skills to Play Up? 871



  • I have an EE degree and about 15 years experience, first as a developer and then as a sales engineer in telephony. I am in the Professional Accounting MBA program at Rutgers and we have had a number of accounting firms, including the Big 4 come in to recruit.
    My skill set is extremely varied. For example I have done a lot of networking work, also internetworking with TCP/UDP and firewall transversal. I have also done some systems type work. Many of the accounting firms that have come in say that they are hiring for their Risk Assessment groups where they need people with IT skills.
    Can anyone tell me what level of IT skills they are looking for? I need to work in a job that will give me Audit credit for the CPA.
    What kinds of skills?
    networking?
    high level application usage?
    consultive sales skills?
    systems engineering?
    WHAT?



  • With my own experience and interaction with the IT side, the following areas are good background for SOX:
    Networking
    Security
    Application support
    Sales skills can be used to your advantage when you work with people (i.e. people skills)
    If you’re process-oriented, understand SOX and know the technology side, I can see why they would want you to join their risk assessment team.
    What’s that saying, ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief’? In this case, it takes a specific expert (eg Network Admin) to help identify gaps/risks for Networking and help mitigate risks.
    Working with the auditors (e.g. big 4) will definitely give you the audit credits you’re looking for.
    Hope that helps.



  • My networking skills are NOT from the network admin side. I was studying to get a CCNA, and have done a lot of low level programming work on TCP/IP and UDP. So while my network architecture is good, my network admin skills are somewhat lacking. I do have a pretty good background in going through firewalls and specifically in peer to peer networking over the internet, have done some work with ActiveX Controls from the Javascript point of view. The ‘knowledge distance’ from my area of expertise to someone who is ‘an IT expert’ and knows how to configure PeopleSoft, for example is really a huge distance. We are both IT people, but IT is a HUGE place. I have never been a hacker or a writer of spyware, but I guess I have the knowledge to do that.


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