fraud analyst Career Path | See the Career Paths People Really Take

senior fraud investigator

fraud investigator

product manager

leader

strategy intern

service consultant

legal assistant

cashier

senior risk manager

A Cashier operates scanners, scales, cash registers, and other electronics, balances the cash register, and accepts payments for goods.  Their role is ensuring all prices and quantities are accurate, generating reports for credit and debit sales, and processing refunds and exchanges.  Their responsibilities are assisting customers by answering questions, helping customers locate items, resolving complaints, following all store procedures, bagging or wrapping purchases to ensure safe transport, and maintaining a clean workspace.

The Fraud Analyst monitors tranactions in a portfolio in order to identify fraudulent activity such as account take overs, friendly fraud, theft and other similar risks.  Their role is to review high risk transactions within a business portfolio, monitor real time queues, and observe customer transactions to mitigate risk and validate authorized activities.  Their role is to resolve queued transactions within the service level agreements, identify fraudulent transactions and cancel them from further processing, interact with banks and customers to confirm or cancel authorizations, resolve customer issues within the scope of existing service level agreements, maintain fraud analysis models to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of company systems, identify system improvements to prevent fraudulent activities, and determine existing fraud trends by reviewing transaction patterns.

Accounting can expose you to unique businesses. Learn about the busy season and what a CPA license can do for you.

fraud analyst

<h2><strong>Accounting Jobs</strong></h2><p>I'm an accountant for a family office. I started my career in public accounting. It does offer you a way to learn about different businesses and how they're run, which I thought was great at the start of my career.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2><strong>Interesting Experiences</strong></h2><p>I've had to do an inventory count in a gigantic warehouse freezer and dress for sub-zero temperatures. I had to do an audit for a learning center with river otters.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2><strong>Public Accounting Workload</strong></h2><p>Public accounting does have a busy season or multiple busy seasons. Usually from late January, early February to mid April, you will probably have to work longer hours, I'd say about 50 to 60 hours a week or six days a week. Most firms do offer overtime pay, so it is, they do make it worth your while when you're logging in the extra hours.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2><strong>Accounting Requirements</strong></h2><p>Most public accounting firms want their accountants to pursue a CPA license. The CPA exams are a series of exams that are fairly difficult. They do require studying, so that's another thing to consider. So usually on top of&nbsp; your workload and the hours that you're logging in at work, you'll have to think about when you're going to study for this exam.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2><strong>More Opportunity</strong></h2><p>Once you do get licensed, I do believe it does open a lot of doors. You could go to a private firm or work for a company depending on your interests and your experience.</p><p><br></p>

Fraud investigators specialize in investigating corporate, financial, insurance and civil fraud cases. They investigate major corporate frauds and government scams wherein they examine financial records, documented communications and approvals, interview suspects and potential witnesses,gather documentary evidence and information from piles of data, evaluate and analyze the same. They may seek inputs of domain experts to back their findings and would work with state regulatory and enforcement agencies to perform background checks, etc to prepare prosecution packages, restitution proposals and prepare evidence backed reports for the perusal of law enforcement agencies wherever prosecution may be involved in the court of law.

A Leader manages, monitors and supervises a group of employees to achieve goals that contribute to the growth of the organization.  Their role is to motivate and inspire their team by creating an environment that promotes positive communication, encourage the bonding of team members, and demonstrate flexibility.  Their responsibilities are managing the day-to-day activities of the team, conducting training of team members to maximize their potential, delegating tasks to team members, conducting quarterly performance reviews, and contributing to the growth of the company through a successful team.

A legal assistant is an individual who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation, or other entity who assist lawyers and paralegals performs legal work for which a lawyer is required. Legal assistants perform tasks requiring knowledge of the law and legal procedures whose responsibilities include providing legal services such as settlements, court filings, legal research and other auxiliary legal services.

A Product Manager is tasked with supervising the development and improvement of company products.  Their role is understanding and researching customer experiences and demands, outlining a detailed product strategy, and managing cross-functional teams.  Their responsibilities are understanding product selling points, identifying and filling product gaps, developing product pricing and positioning strategies, creating new product ideas, acting as a product evangelist, representing the company at public events, determining feature requirements, and working with PR and marketing teams to manage product launches.

Product managers design solutions. You don't have to have a special background or degree to get into this field - but you do need to enjoy thinking analytically and solving problems. Learn more about product management and tips on how to get started.

<h2>Product Managers</h2><p>Product managers don't build products. They help design solutions based off of problems that they've discovered.</p><p><br></p><h2>Product Management Skills</h2><p>You need to be good at solving problems and thinking analytically. That's probably one of the most important skills you need to have. But it's not like you need an engineering degree or you need a math degree. And one of the other important things is to be able to lead and communicate well because this is a job of influence. You're talking to lots of people, from the CEO to customer support to your customers. And you have to be able to talk with them on a one-on-one basis and switch context really easily. Another big requirement is just understanding how software is built. And you don't have to be a computer science major, but you have to have a passion for realizing that software is a series of programs or steps that accomplishes a task. And understanding what those steps are is really important so you can help guide in the development of software.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2>Common Pathways to Product Management</h2><p>There's folks that come into the job from lots of different backgrounds. About 80% of people come through one of two paths. Either they were some sort of engineer by training, or they had some sort of business background by training. Another large segment of people study this concept called human-computer interaction, which is what product managers are doing. They're trying to understand how can humans interact with computers and technology in their everyday life.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2>Tips to Get Into Product Management</h2><p>There's no real training. Anybody can do it. You just have to want to think analytically and solve other people's problems.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>Just starting to network and join tech communities. You could do that online or you could do that in person. And then start working on a project of your own. Look at a simple webpage to make. Look at doing an internship for free online, working for a company five hours a week, designing an email for them. Do something simple. A simple place where you can deliver a product or an experience and measure success.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>It's also really important to know that in this job, data is important, but you've really gotta go on your gut and try to be creative. So it's a combination of what the data tells you, but also what your get tells you about how you can solve a problem for your customers.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>One of the things that's really important about this space is learning about all the new technologies that other people are developing. And so I spend about an hour a day reading about new technologies that are coming out and thinking about, huh, that's a cool thing I could do for my customers. Maybe I can bring that technology into my company and help my customers do something a little bit easier than they were doing in the past.</p><p><br></p>

Senior Fraud investigators specialize in investigating corporate, financial, insurance and civil fraud cases. They investigate major corporate frauds and government scams wherein they examine financial records, documented communications and approvals, interview suspects and potential witnesses,gather documentary evidence and information from piles of data, evaluate and analyze the same. They may seek inputs of domain experts to back their findings and would work with state regulatory and enforcement agencies to perform background checks, etc to prepare prosecution packages, restitution proposals and prepare evidence backed reports for the perusal of law enforcement agencies wherever prosecution may be involved in the court of law.

A Senior Risk Manager determines the financial, safety and security risks for a company or organization, and find ways to reduce those risks through planning and problem solving.  Their role is to identify financial, safety or security risks and prepare action plans to decrease risk factors.  Their responsibilities are to gather confidential financial information from clients such as income, assets and debts, perform risk evaluation, manage company insurance policies, prepare a risk management budget, and provide training and certification for organization staff to be aware of risks and how to avoid them.

A Services Consultant helps customers by resolving complaints, making orders, and answering questions about a product or service.  Their role is ensuring customer satisfaction, handling customer complaints, and processing returns.  Their responsibilities are identifying opportunities to up sell other products and services, referring customers to supervisors, keeping records of customer interactions, reviewing and making changes to customer accounts, obtaining and correctly recording customer information, taking orders, and processing billings and payments.

A Strategy Intern support key projects and analysis in order to gain experience in planning strategies.  Their role is to  serve in key brand price analysis, coordinate and organize styling analysis, and perform a competitive analysis of other brands marketing, social content, and digital initiatives.  Their responsibilities are to assist with daily tasks and presentations, interact with cross-functional partners, plan fieldwork, interview participants, prepare documents, and come up with findings for clients.

Fraud Analyst Career Path