The Truth About GE's Financial Management Program (FMP)
My two cents about GE's Financial Management Program, the two-year, four-rotation program of General Electric.
General Electric FMP Overview
The very first thing you must bear in mind about the GE FMP is that it’s about accounting. Forget investment banking, capital markets, private equity, or anything even only remotely connected to Wall Street or the Square Mile. Finance in GE = accounting. If accounting is what you want to do, the FMP may be a good choice. If Wall Street is your dream, then the FMP is one of the worst choices you could ever make.
GE FMP Wall Street Exit Opps
The only GE finance roles which can give a relatively decent chance of moving to Wall Street are those in BD (business development) i.e. M&A, dispositions, restructuring etc. But there are very few such roles, they’re very cyclical, and when the job market gets tough there will be little reason for an investment bank to prefer an FMP who did BD over a former investment banker with more relevant experience.
On top of that, managers have a less noble incentive to create FMP rotations: in most GE businesses, hiring freezes are common, and headcount and compensation expenditures are closely monitored. When a finance manager creates an FMP rotation, the FMP will not be listed in the headcount, and his salary will not appear in the compensation & benefits line of the P&L. Instead, the GE business in question will pay a fixed contribution to the central FMP office.
International Rotations in the Financial Management Program
You should also pay close attention to the type of contract they’ll give you. If the chances of international rotations are high, you are exposed to the risk of being sent to a country with a higher cost of living and being given inadequate salary adjustments. Salary adjustments and expat packages for FMPs changed by a huge deal from time to time, and among businesses. As always, the rule is: do no trust a single thing you are promised unless it’s backed up by a written contract. If your contract, or a subsequent written document, clearly states that you will get a cost of living adjustment of x% if you move to country Y, fine; but don’t just expect a decent cost of living adjustment because you think GE is like a big mum which takes care of you and looks after your well-being.
What Do You Do in the Financial Management Program?
Finally, let’s get to the nature of the work. This can change, but the constant is that you’ll be an accountant, and therefore be involved with monthly and quarterly closing, as well as with planning sessions. Once again, you must be very sure that you know what accounting is about, and that you’ll like it. Most of the work involves creating reports and filling in tables with numbers. In an ideal world, you should spend 10 minutes retrieving the data and the rest of the day analyzing it, but in reality you’ll spend 90% of your day retrieving, cleansing and reformatting the data, and there will be no time left for meaningful analyses.
Financial Management Program is Effectively a Back Office Role
Most work is extremely mind-numbing and boring, and could be done by any high school student. I remember several FMPs joking about how their work involved only putting numbers into tables and summing them up… Accounting has always been, and will always be, a back office function: lower pay and lower recognition.
Nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re fully aware of it. Not convincend? Just search this forum, or similar ones, for discussions on how to move from the back office to the front office (especially in banks); almost all forums and career websites are inundated with questions on how to pull this off. Clearly every individual is different, and I may love a job you hate, or viceversa, but why is there not a single front office banker who says that he doesn’t like his job, that he’d love to move to the back office but can’t? Not a single one…
Should I Accept a Position in the General Electric FMP?
Bear in mind that only someone close to you and with direct experience in the field could potentially tell you all the pros and cons of a job, of any given job. On-campus events and company websites are completely pointless, because clearly they’re all about trying to convince you how great the roles they offer are.
What if, instead, accounting really is for you? Like I said, if this is the case, the FMP may be a good choice, as long as you’re really convinced accounting is what you want to do. If this is the case, the best way to progress your career is to join CAS, the corporate audit staff, after the FMP. Make no mistakes: CAS is about auditing and accounting, not about anything fancier. You’ll be ticking boxes and putting together Power Point charts all over the globe – but don’t think Paris New York and Melbourne: think more of industrial plants in the middle of nowhere.
The work/life balance is terrible, worse than in M&A (M&A bankers don’t have to spend 3 months in Idaho and then 4 in the Scottish Highlands), the pay is lower but it tends to propel you to a decent career within GE.
GE Work Environment
Also bear in mind that in GE you will be subjected to a very, very intense brainwashing to convince you that GE is like a big family, that your superiors are like caring relatives who look after your well being, etc. Do I need to tell you how naïve of you it would be to believe any of this? While having a powerful sponsor is good for your career, you must build a CV that is marketable on the outside world, too: your hope of career progression cannot just depend on the benevolence of a manager.
To sum up: the fact that I didn’t like it is irrelevant. It can be a good career choice, but only as long as you know what it entails and you have realistic expectations.
You can read more about the FMP on GE's Corporate Website.
You can read more about GE on the WSO Company Database.
You can also check out a video about the FMP below in a video from GE.
Read More About the GE FMP on WSO
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Regarding people that seem to hate FMP, what makes it SO unbearable? I'm curious because the consensus I've seen is that EVERYONE hates their entry-level jobs. I have friends who work at elite boutiques/BBs in i-banking who hate their jobs. I have friends who work at F100s as financial analysts and they hate their jobs. Big 4 accountants hate their jobs. Think consulting is glamorous/sexy? My friend at a big consulting (granted not MBB but still very respectable) hates his job and the politics involved in pandering to his clients' whims rather than what's good for the business. Hell, even the engineers I know who went into their field for the love of science/computers versus money hate their engineering jobs because their work is so marginalized in a large organization.
The thing I'm trying to figure out is are people in general just miserable/unhappy with their work and think the grass is greener? The people in high finance/business hate how stressful/competitive their jobs are and how they work long hours doing mindless crap like formatting PPTs. The people in "lower-tier finance" (so to speak) hate the fact that they make "no money" even though they have plenty of time outside of work to relax, stay healthy, etc.
I think it's more important to understand that entry-level work isn't going to be great, no matter where you are, and try to see the bigger picture as to what your work is trying to achieve/where your experience can take you. Sure, GE probably isn't THE place to be if you have goals of being a BSD PE/HF guy on wall street, but if you're interested in becoming the CFO of a company/division, working in FP&A within a company (maybe even corp dev if you crush it), GE/Big 4 are GREAT places to start. I've even seen people get M7 MBAs and then jump into consulting/IB from GE.
Not trying to chastise anyone, but I truly wonder what makes the job so unbearable that people want to quit within 6 months when other people would kill to get a spot at even the Big 4/GE, much less IB/Consulting. As someone who tried everything to get a job like that coming from undergrad (and had the grades/ECs to do it but didn't get in due to lack of pedigree/OCR/connections), I think a little perspective can do wonders for someone's happiness regardless of where he or she is working.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I've seen plenty of kids who have shit grades from my school who got the few F100 finance jobs that recruited here because their parents worked at the company or they had other contacts. Getting a job today i's not as simple as get good grades, etc. and you're set. There's a lot of other factors that aren't always in your control. I did well in the areas I could control (interview, GPA, ECs), but unfortunately, in a tough job market, the chips just didn't fall into place. It happens. Regardless, this thread isn't about me and my issues with getting a job, so let's leave my situation out of it.
I don't see what your point is. I really doubt there are that many GE FMP people that also had offers in investment banking, so I don't get what you're saying about how they took the job at GE because it was billed as finance. I guarantee most of them were probably upper-tier (not top X% who got IB/Consulting) kids from good schools who didn't have too many other options besides this and took it because of the brand name it would provide for an MBA/other opportunities in the future. Sure HR may have made the program sound sexier than it actually ended up being, but whose HR department doesn't do that? It's just marketing.
Really, I don't see why you're jumping down my throat and I think you missed the entire essence of my post. My point was really that the grass is always greener on the other side and almost nobody is fully satisfied with what their job at the entry-level even if they're in IB, which is supposedly more finance than accounting. I wasn't attacking anyone and even said that if one's goal was to be in PE/HF, GE isn't by any means the ideal starting, particularly if you already have offers in IB/Consulting. However, the program can still open doors in a roundabout way (i.e. use the extra time you would have spent in IB to crush the GMAT, do some ECs, etc. to get into a top MBA) to get you where you want to be and is an excellent place to start for those interested in doing some of the more interesting jobs in the corporate world.
What I meant by perspective is that some of the unhappiness maybe just be part of being at the bottom of the totem pole and getting stuck with all the mind-numbing crap the seniors don't wan't to do. This is the case everywhere and I'm trying to say that I doubt this is just exclusive to GE or other FLDP programs. I always believe there is something you can learn from whatever job you're doing, so it's important to focus on that rather than the shitty part of the job. I'm really just trying to figure out why people hate GE so much when their situation could be much, much worse.