Operations Finance Analyst

The degree is the floor, the tools are the test

A bachelor's degree is required and no prior experience is needed, so a graduate in commerce, accounting or finance can apply without apology. The preferred field is accounting, finance or something close. A CPA, ACCA or CIMA is advantageous, and a part-qualified ACCA should still apply.

The line that will separate candidates is the ERP one. SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, Hyperion and BlackLine all appear in the same posting. Nobody expects a fresher to know five systems. Being able to say you have used SAP or JD Edwards in a college project, an internship or a previous admin job puts you ahead of the queue of applicants who only have Excel.

What the week actually looks like

This is a close-and-report job. Month-end close, account reconciliations, journal entries, financial reporting and SOX controls are the named tasks, and they run to a calendar with hard cutoffs. The last week of the month and the first week of the next one will be heavier than the middle weeks.

Collaborating across teams is in the description for a reason. You'll chase people for numbers, confirm balances, and explain a variance to someone in another function or time zone. Strong spoken and written English matters as much as the accounting, because that chasing is most of the job on a bad day.

Ask about the close calendar and how work is split across the team when you get a call. Whether you are on a single entity or several decides how brutal that week is.

Freshers, and people moving sideways

This fits two kinds of people: a fresh commerce or accounting graduate who wants to start in a shared services setup, and someone with a year or two of accounts payable, receivable or general ledger work who wants a broader accounting role. It is not built for a qualified CA with five years of experience; they would be overqualified for an Accountant I level posting.

If you have never worked inside an ERP, spend a few weekends learning how a journal entry, a reconciliation and a chart of accounts look in SAP. Free tutorials and trial systems exist. Excel you cannot skip: get comfortable with VLOOKUP, pivot tables and basic conditional formatting, since those are what reconciliation work is done in before anything gets posted.

The company is large, so read the fine print

Thermo Fisher is a multinational with a shared services presence in India, and this role sits in an office on a standard weekday schedule. That means structured processes, an audit trail for everything and SOX controls you have to follow to the letter. If you prefer a small company where you touch everything, this will feel narrow at first.

The posting says system automation and process improvement are part of the mindset, which in practice means people who spot a repetitive reconciliation and script or template it get noticed. Have one example ready of a manual task you made less manual, even a college spreadsheet. Confirm the exact office location and whether the schedule is fixed or shifts during close.

Prepared from Thermo Fisher Scientific's job posting and checked against it before publishing. See our Editorial Policy.