Breaking into Corporate Finance after graduation
Hi WSO family,
Wanted to share a little bit of my story and background in the hopes I can get some sound advice on how to break into corporate finance and ways I can improve my strategy. I graduated from a non-target school in South Florida with a decent 3.4 GPA in Finance. Upon graduation, the only work I could get that was remotely close to what I wanted was as an Investment Analyst for a family-owned vertically integrated real estate investment company. This role allows me to hone analysis skills, practice building models for apartment buildings, doing market studies to determine average rents, and cost analysis on the profitability of our $250 million dollar portfolio's performance. A lot of what I have learned I am trying to leverage to break into corporate finance without going back to school just yet. I am also taking the WSP financial modeling courses and honing skills such as financial statement modeling and so on to make myself more marketable. I've been pounding LinkedIn to people currently in the role to network in a genuine way and find out when the roles open up right away internally and have been sending out my application to all parts with hardly making any visible progress. Any advice or suggestions on what I am doing wrong or could do better are greatly appreciated WSO family.
Getting an entry-level Corp Fin role is not very difficult if you know where to look and are willing to move around. I'd make sure to follow the IB resume template here on WSO, and make sure your job descriptions center around your use of excel, any work you've done comparing forecasts to actual results, any variance analysis you've done.. Your goal isn't to show your skills in your Real Estate role, but to show how your experience is transferrable to CF. I've seen it on a handful of resume's that people will try to make their prior roles sound sophisticated, when the hiring manager is really just looking for how your work would apply to the future.
Don't shy away from applying online- there is this mentality that applying online is like throwing your resume into a black hole. That only applies to jobs where there are hundreds or thousands of applicants- in those roles you'll absolutely need networking. In CF, applying online is the fastest way to get your resume where it needs to go.
Let me know if you have more questions!
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