My Career Journey Essay

Describe your career trajectory and significant professional accomplishments to date. I had been working for Changsheng a company producing peanut oil for six years since graduating from college in 1998. I held several different positions in the finance departments. As a result of this mobility, I have been exposed to several different areas of the corporate finance management, and have acquired a broad accounting background. The first three years of my career, I focused on developing my problem-solving and interpersonal skills. My accounting experience taught me to identify the root causes of problems and develop permanent solutions to them.

Because many of the problems I was required to solve were too large for me to address alone, I learned to manage my time effectively.

My fourth year at Changsheng, I was assigned to the position of assistant finance manager for a project to establish and implement an electronic accounting system to replace manual booking system for the company. This system was a major contributor to operation efficiency and I was instrumental in helping to bring it on-line successfully and ahead of schedule.

This experience was a major success for me and I began to advance quickly.

After the system was implemented successfully, I was assigned to finance manager. In this assignment, I focused on improving the performance cash flow by cutting cash cycle. I worked in collaboration with sales team to collecting long overdue accountable receiving, coordinate supply chain team to lower stock level.

I felt I need to do some changing to myself at this time because after six years of finance and accounting experience at a mini-size company, I had become aware that my skill and experience had not prepared me adequately to deal with the broad strategic questions faced by senior level managers. Fortunately I grabbed an opportunity to join Coca-cola the globe famous company. My first position at Coca-cola was assistant managerial accounting manager for a bottling plant, I was responsible for providing constructive management data to management team for cost controlling and preparing annual budget for plant, doing rolling estimate, providing comparison between actual data and budget data.

During the one year experience of doing managerial accounting, I did countless financial analysis regarding all areas of the plant operating, from production overhead analysis to unit cost by SKU analysis, value-chain computing for new brand beverage, logistics cost analysis, rolling forcast etc, doing those various financial analysis let me know the cola-cola business quickly and completely, equipped me with a solid basis for further development in coca-cola.

One year later since I joined Coca-Cola, my position switched to operating finance manager in charge of the accounting activities at 17 sales branches across Shandong Province. At this position, I changed my role from a professional in finance analysis to a strong finance team leader. I learned to delegate and push my subordinates to fulfill their tasks, and I also learned the importance of selling my ideas in order to get them implemented.

At the third year at coca-cola, I thought that I was competent enough for leading a whole finance department of a manufacturing company. I need an opportunity to prove my leadership. At that time, I was recommend to Bunge by a headcount, and obtained a position as the finance controller of the first crushing facility of Bunge China finally. At this new role, I faced challenge that I never met in my career history, I would lead a finance team to accomplish targets in a new company which is away from my living city, I was in a totally fresh environment, I had to be used to this status.

Fist of all, I need to built trust with my new boss, colleges as well as my subordinates as fast as I can, exposed myself to all of them, let them know my management style, Then I started to do something which I am good at. I significantly improved the internal control system of the plant with my 9 years of experience in finance management, especially what I learned from coca-cola. Because of my excellent performance and proved leadership, I was promoted as the finance controller for Bunge Northern China, in charge of two crushing facilities which is located in Rishao and Tianjin respectively at the third year in Bunge. In June this year, I was assigned a new role as the assistant general manager of crushing facility in Tianjin, this is a recognition to my work and competence from my boss, and also an important opportunity for me advance my professional goal。

My most significant accomplishment to date is making decision to join Bunge four years ago. Even though I left my living city, and can’t stay with my family as much time as I could in earlier days, but I tried my best to achieve a good balance between my career and my family. I advanced to senior level management position dealing with strategy and overall management for a multinational corporation in Bunge, at the same time, I go home on every Friday evening, spend three nights and two days with my family at each weekend, I can have a on-line vedio-talk with my wife and son when I am away from home. I and my family are satisfied with current status.