Top 12 Valuation Analyst Skills to Put on Your Resume
To stand out in the competitive field of valuation analysis, your resume needs a crisp mix of technical depth and people-savvy judgment. Show the tools you can wield, the models you can build, and the way you turn messy inputs into defendable conclusions. That blend sells your ability to price businesses, assets, and securities with confidence.
Valuation Analyst Skills
1. Excel
Excel is the day-to-day engine room for valuation work—where models live, assumptions breathe, and outputs get polished into something decision-ready.
Why It's Important
Excel lets a Valuation Analyst model faster, audit assumptions, and present results clearly. From cash flow schedules to scenarios and checks, it keeps the analysis tight and transparent.
How to Improve Excel Skills
Build speed and control, then layer sophistication.
Own core and advanced functions: NPV, IRR, XNPV/XIRR, PMT, RATE, plus modern tools like XLOOKUP, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, LET, and LAMBDA.
Model with structure: Clean inputs, consistent formats, named ranges where helpful, clear separation of inputs/calcs/outputs, and rigorous error checks.
Power Query and Power Pivot: Import, reshape, and model data efficiently. Build data models instead of fragile spreadsheets.
PivotTables and charts: Summarize rapidly and craft visuals that actually explain the story.
Keyboard mastery: Shortcuts compound time savings. So does judicious use of dynamic arrays.
Version control and auditability: Keep assumptions traceable, add flags and diagnostics, and document key levers.
These habits turn Excel from a grid into a valuation workbench.
How to Display Excel Skills on Your Resume
2. Argus
Argus Enterprise is the commercial real estate standard for property cash flows, valuations, and scenarios across assets and portfolios.
Why It's Important
It captures lease-level detail, market assumptions, and expense structures in a consistent framework, so valuations reflect reality and scale across many properties.
How to Improve Argus Skills
Precision matters. So do workflows.
Input integrity: Reconcile rent rolls, lease terms, options, and market leasing assumptions. Cross-check against source documents and market comps.
Templates and standards: Use repeatable models for property types, with consistent naming and assumptions libraries.
Scenario and sensitivity: Test changes in downtime, TI/LCs, renewal probabilities, cap rates, and exit assumptions.
Integrate market research: Layer third-party data (e.g., vacancy, rents, cap rates) to anchor assumptions.
Stay current: Keep software updated and practice with new features so you don’t miss workflow gains.
That mix sharpens valuations and speeds portfolio analysis.
How to Display Argus Skills on Your Resume
3. Python
Python is the flexible toolkit for analysis: cleaning data, building valuation engines, backtesting comps, automating drudgery.
Why It's Important
It handles large datasets, complex models, and repeatable analysis with less friction, which means faster, more reliable valuation work.
How to Improve Python Skills
Focus on the libraries and patterns you’ll actually use.
Pandas and NumPy: Data wrangling and numerical computing are your bread and butter.
Matplotlib/Seaborn: Visualize trends, residuals, and distributions that drive assumptions.
Jupyter workflows: Explore, document, and share valuation notebooks with narrative and code side by side.
Financial modeling: Build DCF modules, WACC calculators, comp-set screeners, and scenario engines as functions or classes.
Projects: Work with real datasets—prices, filings, macro series—to replicate valuation cases end to end.
Testing and version control: Add unit tests for valuation functions and manage code with Git. Reliability isn’t optional.
Iteration trumps theory here. Ship small tools, then refine.
How to Display Python Skills on Your Resume
4. SQL
SQL is how you interrogate relational data—cleanly, reproducibly, and at scale.
Why It's Important
It pulls the exact slices of financial and operational data you need for valuation: histories, cohorts, transactions, and time series, all with audit trails.
How to Improve SQL Skills
Write queries that answer valuation questions fast—and correctly.
Core fluency: SELECT, WHERE, JOINs, GROUP BY, HAVING. No copy-paste guesswork.
Window functions and CTEs: Running totals, ranking, period-over-period deltas, cleaner complex logic.
Performance: Understand indexing, execution plans, and how to avoid row-by-row traps.
Data modeling: Read schemas, trust normalization, and know when a star schema helps.
Finance focus: Build queries for margins, cohort LTV, churn, AR and AP aging, seasonality, and forecast inputs.
Practice: Solve real problems routinely and keep a snippets library you actually reuse.
Good SQL shrinks analysis time and reduces spreadsheet contortions.
How to Display SQL Skills on Your Resume
5. DCF
Discounted Cash Flow values an asset by projecting future cash flows and discounting them back to today at a rate that reflects risk.
Why It's Important
DCF anchors valuation in economics, not just market mood. It forces clarity on drivers: growth, margins, reinvestment, and required return.
How to Improve DCF Skills
Make inputs defensible. Make structure robust.
Cash flow realism: Tie forecasts to unit economics, market share logic, capacity, and pricing power. Reconcile to history.
WACC and discount rates: Estimate cost of equity and debt with market-consistent inputs, company-specific risk, and capital structure that converges.
Terminal value discipline: Use a sustainable growth rate below long-run nominal GDP or a carefully chosen exit multiple cross-checked to comps.
Sensitivity maps: Show how value flexes with growth, margins, capex, and discount rate. Don’t hide the wobbly bits.
Scenarios: Build downside, base, and upside with coherent narratives and linked assumptions.
Cross-checks: Compare to trading and transaction comps, implied multiples, and sanity checks like value per user or per unit capacity.
Refresh often: Update when fundamentals or rates shift. Stale DCFs mislead.
Clarity beats precision theater. Explain the drivers and own the ranges.
How to Display DCF Skills on Your Resume
6. CAPM
CAPM links expected return to systematic risk through the risk-free rate, market risk premium, and beta. It’s a core piece of cost of equity and WACC.
Why It's Important
It provides a consistent, transparent way to translate market risk into discount rates used across valuation models.
How to Improve CAPM Skills
Refine inputs and broaden where needed.
Forward-looking posture: Use forward estimates for market premium and a thoughtfully estimated beta, not only the past.
Sector-aware betas: Relever industry betas and adjust for operating leverage and geography.
Factor add-ons when justified: Size, value, momentum, liquidity—augment CAPM where evidence and context demand it.
Global exposures: For cross-border businesses, consider a global market proxy and country risk adjustments.
Liquidity and small-cap frictions: Add premiums where trading costs and depth warrant it, and document the rationale.
CAPM is a starting line. Tailor it to the business you’re valuing.
How to Display CAPM Skills on Your Resume
7. Bloomberg
Bloomberg delivers real-time and historical data, analytics, news, and powerful functions for market and company analysis.
Why It's Important
Fast access to trusted data and analytics means cleaner comps, better benchmarks, and tighter model inputs—without the scavenger hunt.
How to Improve Bloomberg Skills
Get more from the Terminal by sharpening workflow.
Function fluency: Know the go-to pages for equities, credit, rates, and macro. Build custom monitors for your coverage.
Excel add-in: Pull auditable, parameterized data directly into models and control refresh windows.
Data sanity checks: Cross-verify fields, units, and point-in-time values. Document overrides.
Screen, then drill: Use screeners to narrow the field and deep-dive with financials, filings, and estimates in one place.
Training and shortcuts: Learn keyboard commands, function maps, and take the foundational courses to speed everything up.
API awareness: Where allowed, streamline recurring data pulls via the API for repeatable processes.
The difference between browsing and analyzing is workflow. Make it smooth.
How to Display Bloomberg Skills on Your Resume
8. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is accounting software that captures day-to-day transactions, producing the financial statements many private-company valuations start from.
Why It's Important
Reliable inputs matter. Clean, timely ledgers and reports reduce reconciliation noise and sharpen your valuation picture.
How to Improve QuickBooks Skills
Make the data trustworthy and easy to analyze.
Chart of accounts discipline: Standardize categories so margins and trends are comparable over time.
Report customization: Build custom P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow views that align with your valuation model structure.
Close procedures: Reconciliations, accruals, inventory adjustments—tighten the month-end so inputs aren’t wobbly.
Integrations: Connect to banks, payroll, and inventory systems to cut manual entry and errors.
Access and security: Role-based access, two-factor authentication, and audit logs keep data clean and compliant.
Stay updated: Use the latest version and features that improve reporting and controls.
Cleaner books, cleaner valuation. Simple as that.
How to Display QuickBooks Skills on Your Resume
9. VBA
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) powers automation and customization inside Excel—perfect for repetitive valuation tasks and bespoke functions.
Why It's Important
It slashes manual work, enforces consistency, and lets you build tools that fit your exact modeling needs.
How to Improve VBA Skills
Think like a builder, test like an auditor.
Core programming: Variables, loops, conditionals, and modular code. Keep subs focused and readable.
Excel object model: Work confidently with workbooks, worksheets, ranges, and charts.
Error handling and debugging: Trap errors gracefully and trace issues fast.
Speed tactics: Turn off screen updating, use arrays and dictionaries, and limit cell-by-cell operations.
Valuation use cases: Automate comp pulls, scenario toggles, audit checks, and report packaging.
Documentation: Comment code and keep a user guide for handoffs.
Small macros, big time savings.
How to Display VBA Skills on Your Resume
10. SAS
SAS is a suite for advanced analytics, data management, and reporting—useful when you’re swimming in large, structured datasets that require rigorous analysis.
Why It's Important
It handles heavy data lifting, robust statistical work, and standardized reporting, which can strengthen valuations that lean on complex or regulated data.
How to Improve SAS Skills
Target the pieces that matter for valuation.
Programming basics: Data step, PROC SQL, joins, reshaping, and merges for clean datasets.
Descriptive and inferential analysis: PROC MEANS, FREQ, REG, and time series tools for trend and driver analysis.
Reporting: PROC REPORT and TABULATE to produce stakeholder-ready summaries.
Code hygiene: Modularize, comment, and reuse macros. Validate with test datasets.
Performance: Indexing, memory awareness, and efficient data steps for speed.
Practice with real finance data: Build repeatable pipelines from raw extracts to model-ready tables.
When data is big and strict, SAS keeps it orderly.
How to Display SAS Skills on Your Resume
11. Tableau
Tableau turns rows into stories—interactive dashboards and visuals that surface patterns fast.
Why It's Important
Stakeholders grasp drivers and risks quicker when trends, cohorts, and outliers are visual and explorable. That speeds decisions.
How to Improve Tableau Skills
Marry analytical rigor with visual clarity.
Calculations and LODs: Use Level of Detail expressions and table calculations to answer nuanced questions cleanly.
Interactivity: Parameters, actions, filters, and drilldowns that let viewers self-serve deeper questions.
Purpose-built visuals: Waterfalls for bridges, scatter matrices for comps, cohort charts for retention or unit economics.
Data prep: Clean and shape sources with Tableau Prep or upstream tools before you visualize.
Design principles: Reduce clutter, highlight signals, and annotate insights. Color and scale with intent.
Performance: Optimize extracts, limit over-detailed views, and cache smartly.
Great dashboards don’t just look good—they answer the right questions.
How to Display Tableau Skills on Your Resume
12. Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft’s analytics stack for modeling, visualizing, and sharing insights across teams.
Why It's Important
It connects to many sources, shapes data with Power Query, and models it with DAX—then distributes interactive reports that keep everyone aligned.
How to Improve Power BI Skills
Build models that scale, not one-off reports.
DAX competency: Measures for margins, growth, rolling periods, cohort metrics, and scenario flags.
Power Query: Reliable, repeatable transformations that turn messy source data into model-grade tables.
Data modeling: Star schemas, proper relationships, role-playing date tables, and surrogate keys for clean calculations.
Design and interactivity: Bookmarking, tooltips, drill-through, and navigation that make analysis fluid.
Governance and sharing: Understand workspaces, datasets, row-level security, and refresh strategies.
Performance tuning: VertiPaq-friendly models, reduced cardinality, and optimized measures.
The payoff is living reports that stay fresh and trustworthy.
How to Display Power BI Skills on Your Resume
