Hailey Laverty shares how to build a treasury career, covering the skills that matter most, how to develop them on the job, and why communication and relationships are as important as technical knowledge.
I think that was me putting my hand up and saying, my colleague was, at the time, was preparing the US 144A documentation. They didn't have time to do both. So I put my hand up and said, well, I can do. So we had a debate, shall we do both? Do we need to do both? And I was like, why don't I do that bit while you're doing the other piece? So it was sort of similar with treasury policy work, whereby actually there were things that we wanted to adjust in the policies, again, just down to different time constraints and different people. People just actually really not having time to do it, even though we really wanted to do it. And we wanted to do it as a team and as a leadership team in treasury, and me putting my hand up and saying, well, I'll do it, I'll do the first draft, I'll write the policy. And then that took the pressure off those other individuals, so they could then review it and contribute to it afterwards. That's where you then you really get tested in terms of trying to broaden your knowledge. If you have to sit there and try and write a PA or a policy around something that actually you're technically not the lead expert in your team, it's not always possible to recruit someone with sort of the perfect technical background either for any of these roles. From my point of view, quite a lot of the time it's more about the general skill set that that person has and their ability to learn, and their desire to learn, I guess, and their desire for that job. So they are. If there are elements of their background that can be adapted into a Treasury role, or they're bringing something that's beneficial to the role that someone else might not have brought. From what you might say might have been an ideal background in theory, then I think that that's always important for the wider team as well. So I think I'm quite open. It really, really depends on the role and it depends on the technical gaps that we're. That we're trying to fill. Treasury can be some quite diverse roles within treasury got the bank relationship piece as well as maybe understanding the intricacies of cash management. So quite often I think you're trying to find some relatively broad people to fill some of those roles. For me, quite often it really has to come down to face to face interaction, getting an understanding of really what drives that person and their communication skills, especially in treasury, where in most roles you will be trying to build external relationships with banking partners. And that is how we bring additional quite often how we bring additional ideas into treasury. And therefore it's really important that those people can build those relationships and manage those relationships with the external banks, be that the more specialist teams at the banks or on the general relationship side. So I think that that's always important and that's always something I would be looking for in most of my team members.
