Finance, HR & Legal Skills in Demand

Corporate functions run the business itself: finance, accounting, people, legal and administration. Skills split by specialty, with accounting standards and credentials showing up strongly in the finance roles.

We analyzed 79 U.S. job descriptions from 21 employers for Finance, HR & Legal roles. The most requested skills were Excel (28%), Project management (16%) and SQL (14%).

1,219open U.S. roles tracked
5 yearstypical experience asked for
$200,000median advertised pay, from 39 roles that state it

Business tools

  • Excel28%
  • PowerPoint11%

Product & design

  • Project management16%

Languages

  • SQL14%
  • Python9%

Finance & legal

  • Financial modeling13%
  • CPA13%
  • Stakeholder management11%
  • FP&A9%

Data

  • Power BI10%

Updated November 7, 2026, using job descriptions collected since September 26, 2026. Shares show how many of the sampled descriptions mention a skill, so a low share can still be a firm requirement in the roles that list it. We sample a limited number of descriptions per employer so that no single company dominates, and we only report figures backed by several employers. Advertised pay comes from a different group of roles than H1B filings, so the two are not directly comparable.

All job families