Cameron Cosgrove ⋅ San Clemente, CA First American Title Company ⋅ 30 years experience

Patrick,

You are getting some great feedback here...

Here is what I would add: You should step back and think about your goal. Are you a Finance guy that wants to be able to program? Your major in Finance would suggest your long term goal is to be a CFO versus a leader in the IT space.

If a leading role in Finance is your end game, then you should really learn Excel functions in-depth when connected to a data source along with Microsoft PowerView and PowerPivot first. These are productivity tools used almost everywhere; and enough to land you a job. Second, you should learn about ERP systems and the internal reporting systems; that will give you an edge. For example, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics are leading ERP packages. You should learn all about ERP systems and learn how you can create reports and dashboards. There are many different reporting and dashboard solutions out there to learn. So at least get a basic understanding of how they work.

Learning these basic skills will make you marketable. But, in the long run if you want to be a finance guy--you will want to stay on the business side versus being viewed as an IT resource.

While Java is a great language to learn in general, I'm not sure how well that directly translate to a finance role--you want to be skilled at establishing budgets, expense reporting, analyzing M & A proposals and being able to evaluate capital deployment options not building web sites. You probably know enough already to stitch things together with code--and that may be plenty.

If on the other hand, you really want to program most of the time, you could go into a role where you support the finance team with application development, testing, etc.

I strongly suggest you do a search on CFO's or VP of finance positions in large companies near you--and reach out to them with an email or phone call, asking for a lunch meeting or 15 minutes for career advice. I hope you would get some people in finance roles accepting your request and they will be able to steer you as well.

Ted Mittelstaedt ⋅ Portland, OR Portlandia IT LLC ⋅ 20 years experience

Patrick,

Programmers are a lot like plumbers (except they get paid a lot more) they work on programming for a wide variety of industries and businesses. Today there is an incredible, unbelievable, demand for programmers with certain skills - take a look at Google's own job listings for examples - many of those positions have gone unfilled for months. In my city of Portland OR the general manager of the Google office there recently was quoted in the paper saying he was hiring programmers immediately if they walked in off the street.

You may have some interest in finance but if you want to write code for a living your first love should be writing code, you shouldn't be caring what industry the code is for. Whoever hires you to write code is going to tell you how they want it written they are not interested in your financial acumen or experience - indeed if you tell them you have financial experience and they are a banker they might even regard it as a liability. The general contractor of a home has no interest in the plumber he hired to plumb in the sink telling him where to put the sink in the house and what type it should be.

Use the open job listings for the major employers like Facebook, Google, Intel, and others to see what programming languages they want candidates to be familiar in. Then write a mobile app that does something useful in one of those languages and put it up on Google Store and walk into any of those employers and show them your app and they will hire you so fast you won't know what hit you.

Brian Fox ⋅ Voorhees, NJ SURGE / Personal Clients ⋅ 31 years experience

Hello Patrick,

It really depends upon what the finance corporation you're seeking employment from is doing. If they need developers for browser-based applications, you might need skills with PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, web services and AJAX or the .NET family of technologies, often with a MySQL database on the back end. If they are focusing on the development of mobile applications, Java is a great language to have expertise in, or they might be developing it in Objective-C, HTML5, Javascript, CSS with REST services interacting with a database.

I would continue strengthening myself in Java, but if you lack some of the other languages above and/or database experience, I would also begin focusing on them if you feel that most of the opportunities are focusing on websites. If you can provide more insight into what you are seeking and the requirements that these jobs are posting, I can probably provide greater insight.

Brian Fox

Ravi Kallianpur ⋅ Hammond, LA Louisiana State University ⋅ 28 years experience

Patrick,

Given that you are mostly interested in business applications programming, I definitely would include Database Management training; and this means learning database querying and reporting tools such as MySQL, Crystal Reports. The demand for these skill is pretty high since everything today needs and uses databases. You may also focus on Visual C, which has the capability to extend Off the shelf products such as Excel.

Rick Vangrin ⋅ San Clemente, CA IBM ⋅ 21 years experience

The most important technical skill for finance/accounting will be deep, deep knowledge of Excel. Understanding Visual Basic programming and how to apply it to creating powerful Excel spreadsheets will be highly valuable. Hyperion Essbase and/or IBM Cognos TM1 are the two dominant, off-the-shelf analytic solutions used within corporate finance, so an understanding of either of those solutions will also be helpful.

Paul Trejo ⋅ Austin, TX University of Texas at Austin ⋅ 40 years experience

Patrick,

First, thanks for your years of service to the USA. Secondly, as somebody from the old Silicon Valley in California, I can say with some assurance that Microsoft C#.NET is the current language of choice. In fact, some of the C# libraries were later included inside Java -- that's how powerful C#.NET actually is.

The history is that Bill Gates approached Sun Systems in the 1990's with a deal for Java, and Sun turned him down. In response, Bill Gates assembled an international team and created C#.NET, and started the .NET revolution which edged Sun Systems out of the back-office to make .NET into the global back-office giant that it is today.

It's most common in my shop (and at Dell, for example) for software programmers to use Microsoft Visual Studio.NET for all development, and to focus on C#.NET as the main language, and VisualBasic.NET comes in second. Yet everything in Microsoft refers back to C#.NET, ultimately, which contains the class libraries for literally *everything* in Microsoft (and even some parts of Java). C#.NET is the apex, from where I'm standing.

Best wishes in your programming career. You'll love it.
--Paul Trejo

Amit Chaudhary ⋅ San Jose, CA Doordash, Silicon Valley Software Company ⋅ 20 years experience

Hi Patrick,

There is no finance as such, it is too wide a field to category for Programming Roles.

Given that, for many Investment or Regular Banks, etc, Java is most commonly used with a high end database such as Oracle. But you will also see more competition here, more requirements in terms of years of experience, certification

Hedge funds use C++ for their main differentiation & Java, Python, etc for plumbing. See
https://www.rentec.com/Jobs.action
http://www.indeed.com/q-Hedge-Fund-Programmer-l-New-York,-NY-jobs.html
http://www.quantstart.com/articles/My-Experiences-as-a-Quantitative-Developer-in-a-Hedge-Fund

You can use the indeed.com link to check for openings in say Banks in Chicago, etc.

There is a trend to Cloud, specifically S3 & other services run by Amazon Web services. That is not as competitive yet in terms of many applicants.

The other tech including C# & Rails are also used by Financial companies

Finally, if you can build small programs (2k lines) in any one of these, you have a head start.

All the best
Amit

Matt Weingast ⋅ Hightstown, NJ GarryOwen Ventures LLC ⋅ 25 years experience

You are getting some great answers here -- awesome to see this forum working for you! Only input I can add is that I have a very good friend who is an executive recruiter for IT people in the Financial Services industry. That is his expertise. If you are interested, let me know directly and I will provide you with his contact info.
Good luck -- and thank you for your service to our great Nation!!

Kelly Thrasher ⋅ Denver, PA Accolade ⋅ 20 years experience

Patrick, Great answers here. In short, if you want to be a developer work on that and see what the current jobs are posted. If you want to enter the finanical realm, work on those skills. The company I work for outsources and buys COTS since we're a finanical company 1st. We do have some great IT professionals and CIOs, etc BUT they are in that filed to be great IT solutions experts not financial experts. With all of the domestic businesses having a myriad of systems, I couldn't tell you what to focus on language wise.

Good luck,

Kelly

William Gougler ⋅ Lafayette, CO HCL America ⋅ 38 years experience

In the technology field -Java is the ubiquitous language. We have supported multiple financial clients.....custom and standard and Java is what most applications are written in. But be more than a developer - be an analyst and use java and reporting tools to gain key financial insights. And do not simply be a programmer but let others help you to add real value .....
to you new client or employer.

Charles Boice ⋅ Pensacola, FL State of Florida, Dept. of Labor & Employment Security ⋅ 28 years experience

You ask: " Is java a language that is primarily used in finance, or are there other languages that employers would prefer?"
Answer: Ask employers. Take a poll.