Top 12 Compliance Examiner Skills to Put on Your Resume
In the highly regulated field of compliance, a sharp resume matters. If you’re aiming at a Compliance Examiner role, these 12 skills carry real weight. Build strength across them, and your profile stops blending in and starts getting calls.
Compliance Examiner Skills
- Auditing
- Risk Assessment
- Regulatory Knowledge
- Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
- Know Your Customer (KYC)
- Data Analysis
- Excel
- SQL
- Compliance Software (e.g., Actimize)
- Reporting
- Policy Development
- Ethics
1. Auditing
Auditing, for a Compliance Examiner, means a methodical review of records, processes, and controls to confirm they align with laws, regulations, and internal standards. Objective evidence. Clear conclusions. Defensible workpapers.
Why It's Important
Auditing verifies whether controls actually work and whether obligations are met. It exposes control gaps, validates remediation, and strengthens accountability across business lines.
How to Improve Auditing Skills
Continuous education: Track changes to standards and regulations (IIA Standards, PCAOB guidance, ISO 19011, SOX expectations). Refresh risk, control, and sampling techniques often.
Data-driven testing: Use analytics and continuous auditing to move from small samples to population-level testing. Prioritize anomaly detection and trend analysis.
Risk-based scoping: Apply the COSO framework to focus on high-impact, high-likelihood risks. Spend time where failure hurts most.
Technology fluency: Become proficient with audit and analytics platforms (e.g., ACL/IDEA—now commonly offered under broader GRC analytics suites). Build repeatable scripts.
Communication: Tailor messages to audiences—boards want concise risk implications; process owners need practical fixes. Groups like Toastmasters help sharpen delivery.
Ethics and independence: Anchor work to the IIA Code of Ethics and your organization’s independence policy. No surprises; clear scope; clean escalation paths.
Do this well and your audit work becomes a lever for real, measurable risk reduction.
How to Display Auditing Skills on Your Resume
2. Risk Assessment
Risk assessment identifies and evaluates threats to compliance—then ranks them so resources go to the right places. What can go wrong, how bad if it does, how often, and what control stands in the way.
Why It's Important
It underpins your entire program. Strong assessment reduces penalties, improves control spend, and clarifies accountability.
How to Improve Risk Assessment Skills
Refresh the risk register: Update frequently with regulatory changes, new products, vendors, geographies, and emerging typologies (including crypto exposure and third-party risks).
Use a true risk-based approach: Weight likelihood and impact consistently. Document rationale. Calibrate with loss data and near-miss incidents.
Strengthen controls: Map risks to controls, test control design and operating effectiveness, and record residual risk. Align with COSO internal control principles.
Leverage analytics: Build KRIs, outlier monitoring, and scenario analysis. Continuous controls monitoring tightens detection windows.
Engage stakeholders: Risk owners validate ratings. Compliance challenges where needed. Governance bodies approve results.
Benchmark and learn: Track guidance from bodies like FinCEN, the Basel Committee, and professional associations to spot emerging vulnerabilities.
How to Display Risk Assessment Skills on Your Resume
3. Regulatory Knowledge
Regulatory knowledge means understanding the laws, rules, and guidance that bind your organization—how they apply, where the gaps are, how to evidence compliance.
Why It's Important
It prevents missteps that lead to fines and orders. It protects customers. It preserves institutional trust with supervisors and auditors.
How to Improve Regulatory Knowledge Skills
Ongoing learning: Follow updates from agencies such as the SEC, FINRA, CFPB, and the CFTC. Track enforcement trends, not just rule text.
Digest the big changes: In the U.S., beneficial ownership information reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act began in 2024, with ongoing compliance and update obligations. Adjust onboarding and customer updates accordingly.
Conferences and roundtables: Engage with peers and examiners to hear how rules are interpreted in practice. War stories matter.
Translate to controls: Map requirements to specific policies, procedures, and evidence. Make the path from rule to proof painfully clear.
Maintain a library: Curate guidance, FAQs, and internal interpretations so teams stop reinventing the wheel.
How to Display Regulatory Knowledge Skills on Your Resume
4. Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
AML covers the laws, controls, and processes that deter, detect, and report illicit finance. From onboarding through transaction monitoring, case investigation, SAR filing, and model governance.
Why It's Important
It protects the financial system and keeps your institution off the wrong side of enforcement. It’s also where examiners spend serious time—model risk, alert quality, sanctions hygiene.
How to Improve Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Skills
Stay aligned to standards: Track FATF guidance, FinCEN priorities, and sanctions program updates (including OFAC). Reflect changes quickly in risk assessment and controls.
Elevate monitoring: Blend rules with machine learning where appropriate. Tune thresholds. Monitor model performance, bias, and drift under a documented model risk framework.
CDD/EDD precision: Segment by risk. Use enhanced due diligence for high-risk profiles and complex ownership structures. The BOI reporting regime affects beneficial ownership verification practices.
Investigations that tell a story: Crisp narratives, evidentiary support, and timely SARs. No copy-paste summaries. Clear typology identification (mule activity, funneling, trade-based schemes, virtual assets).
Training and QA: Routine typology refreshers for analysts. Independent QA on alert handling and SAR quality. Feedback loops into tuning.
Cross-border coordination: Cooperate with counterparties and, where appropriate, information-sharing mechanisms to address international exposure.
How to Display Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Skills on Your Resume
5. Know Your Customer (KYC)
KYC verifies identity, assesses customer risk, and monitors for changes over time. Documents, non-documentary verification, sanctions/PEP screening, ongoing reviews—front to back.
Why It's Important
It’s the front gate for AML and sanctions programs. Strong KYC narrows false positives and makes monitoring far more effective.
How to Improve Know Your Customer (KYC) Skills
Modernize onboarding: Use risk-based, digital identity verification and robust sanctions/PEP screening. Bake in beneficial ownership checks and BOI reporting impacts where applicable.
CDD that scales: Define clear risk tiers, required documents, and verification steps. For high-risk customers, execute EDD with corroborating sources.
Perpetual KYC: Move beyond periodic reviews to trigger-based updates (ownership changes, jurisdiction shifts, activity spikes).
Data quality: Enforce standards for name, address, identifiers, and documentary images. Validate, deduplicate, and audit trails for changes.
Feedback from monitoring: Use monitoring outcomes to refine customer risk ratings and due diligence depth. Close the loop.
How to Display Know Your Customer (KYC) Skills on Your Resume
6. Data Analysis
Data analysis for compliance means digging into large, messy datasets to surface anomalies, patterns, and control failures—and proving or disproving hypotheses with evidence.
Why It's Important
It turns intuition into defensible findings. It accelerates testing, sharpens monitoring, and improves reporting quality.
How to Improve Data Analysis Skills
Statistical grounding: Confidence intervals, distributions, outlier logic, correlation vs. causation. Know when a pattern is noise.
Toolbox depth: Excel for quick work; SQL for scale; Python or R for heavier analytics. Use reproducible notebooks and version control.
Visualization: Communicate with charts that answer the question, fast. Build dashboards that highlight exceptions and trends, not decoration.
Data plumbing: Learn joins, data cleaning, and lineage. Document transformations. Trustworthy inputs make trustworthy outputs.
Regulatory alignment: Tie analytics to specific requirements and controls. Keep an audit trail of logic, parameters, and code.
How to Display Data Analysis Skills on Your Resume
7. Excel
Excel remains the quick blade: data wrangling, testing, reporting, and ad hoc analysis—fast, transparent, and flexible.
Why It's Important
Compliance teams live in spreadsheets for sampling, reconciliations, and evidence. Mastery saves time and reduces errors.
How to Improve Excel Skills
Modern functions: Prioritize
XLOOKUP,FILTER,UNIQUE,SUMIFS,INDEX+MATCH, and dynamic arrays. They replace clunky legacy approaches.Pivot power: Build pivots for quick profiling and exception finds. Add slicers and timelines for quick drilldowns.
Data validation and protection: Lock formulas, restrict inputs, and use structured tables to prevent silent corruption.
Conditional formatting: Highlight breaches, deadlines, and outliers instantly. Let the sheet talk back.
Automation: Record macros for simple tasks; move into VBA or Office Scripts for repeatable, auditable workflows.
Power tools: Use Power Query for ETL and Power Pivot for data models and DAX measures. Better models, better reports.
How to Display Excel Skills on Your Resume
8. SQL
SQL lets you interrogate the truth at the source—databases and warehouses—so findings are both fast and verifiable.
Why It's Important
Compliance decisions rely on precise data pulls. SQL delivers targeted extracts, reconciliations, and monitoring at scale.
How to Improve SQL Skills
Core fluency:
SELECT,JOIN,WHERE,GROUP BY,HAVING, subqueries, and CTEs. Clean, readable queries win.Window functions:
ROW_NUMBER,RANK,LAG/LEAD, and aggregates over partitions for powerful trend and anomaly work.Performance awareness: Understand indexing basics, predicates, and how to avoid cartesian explosions. Test on realistic volumes.
Security and compliance: Parameterize queries, respect least privilege, and mask or tokenize sensitive data. Log who ran what, when.
Data quality: Build checks for duplicates, nulls, and invalid values. Surface exceptions before analysis begins.
How to Display SQL Skills on Your Resume
9. Compliance Software (e.g., Actimize)
Compliance platforms—such as NICE Actimize, Oracle FCCM, SAS, and modern GRC suites—centralize monitoring, case management, policies, testing, and reporting. They scale what a small army used to do.
Why It's Important
They improve detection, reduce manual toil, and add traceability. Better alerts, faster investigations, cleaner evidence.
How to Improve Compliance Software (e.g., Actimize) Skills
Exploit advanced features: Use scenario libraries, network analytics, segmentation, negative news integration, and case scoring. Tune relentlessly.
Stay current with rules: When standards shift (FATF, local regulators), update scenarios, thresholds, and documentation quickly.
Train the users: Role-based training for analysts, QA, and administrators. Short videos and job aids help the knowledge stick.
Customize with guardrails: Configure to your risk profile while preserving upgrade paths. Document every change. Use dev/test/prod separation.
Model risk governance: Inventory models, validate, monitor, and retire when stale. Explainability matters.
Security first: Strong access controls, audit logs, and data encryption. Integrate with enterprise identity and incident response.
How to Display Compliance Software (e.g., Actimize) Skills on Your Resume
10. Reporting
Reporting translates examinations and monitoring into decisions. Narratives, metrics, issues, remediation, and governance artifacts—clear and complete.
Why It's Important
Good reports drive action. They show control health, surface risk, and evidence compliance to auditors and regulators.
How to Improve Reporting Skills
Know the audience: Executives want risk and impact; regulators want completeness and evidence; operators want the fix and the owner.
Tight structure: Executive summary, scope, methodology, findings, risk ratings, root cause, actions, owners, and due dates. No fluff.
Data lineage: Explain sources, transformations, and limitations. Include footnotes and definitions so numbers can be trusted.
Visual clarity: Use simple charts, consistent scales, and direct labels. Highlight exceptions and trends, not decoration.
Quality checks: Peer review, control totals, and cross-references to workpapers. Version control every draft.
Feedback loop: Gather comments from stakeholders and refine templates. Continuous improvement beats one-off heroics.
How to Display Reporting Skills on Your Resume
11. Policy Development
Policy development creates the rules and procedures that translate regulation into daily behavior. Clear, enforceable, auditable.
Why It's Important
Policies set expectations, standardize controls, and provide the evidence trail examiners look for.
How to Improve Policy Development Skills
Tie to requirements: Map policies to specific laws, rules, and internal standards. Cross-reference controls and evidence.
Engage the field: Bring in operations, legal, risk, and technology early. Practical input prevents shelfware.
Risk-based detail: High-risk processes get deeper procedures; low-risk areas stay lean. Keep it readable.
Training and attestations: Roll out changes with training, FAQs, and required attestations. Capture completion.
Governance and versioning: Document owners, approvers, and review cycles. Keep a changelog and archive superseded versions.
Monitoring: Test adherence, track exceptions, and feed results into updates. Policies should evolve, not ossify.
How to Display Policy Development Skills on Your Resume
12. Ethics
Ethics are the guardrails—integrity, fairness, accountability. In compliance, they’re nonnegotiable.
Why It's Important
Ethics preserves trust with customers, colleagues, and regulators. It prevents conflicts and ensures examinations stay impartial.
How to Improve Ethics Skills
Know the standards: Internal code of conduct, IIA ethics, and relevant industry codes. No gray on the basics.
Lead by example: Transparent decisions, documented rationale, clean handling of sensitive information. Model the behavior you expect.
Manage conflicts: Disclose promptly, recuse when needed, and record the steps taken. Gifts and entertainment policies apply to everyone.
Speak-up culture: Safe reporting channels, anti-retaliation, and visible follow-through. People report when they believe it matters.
Modern considerations: Ethical use of AI and data, privacy-first design, and fairness in models and alerts. Review for bias and unintended impacts.
Assess regularly: Ethics risk assessments, training refreshers, and targeted audits where pressure or incentives run high.
How to Display Ethics Skills on Your Resume
