Aug 11, 2024

Feeling like I’m heading towards a dead end

I was fortunate enough to land a role in PC and an interesting firm that invests in a really niche asset class. Coming from an extremely non-target background with only commercial banking experience as my selling point, I am very lucky to be in the position I am in.

While I enjoy the role and the environment I’m in (great co workers), I can’t help but feel like I could end up stagnating my career. I’ll explain why.

Prior to my role, I was in commercial banking at a BB. My role was analyzing small/medium businesses and assisting the underwriting process. Nothing too intense, just basic analysis and threw together a little memo basically highlighting if they’re safe or not. Now that I’m in my new role, it feel like just a slightly more detailed extension of what I was doing at BB. I enjoy the work, and it’s definitely more “investment focused” than just testing the creditworthiness of companies, but I can’t help but feel like I’ll be an extremely unappealing candidate going forward if my resume is mainly just financial due dilligence/analysis.

For context, I just turned 25 years old last month and my salary is 85k + ~20% bonus. I know some people on this forum are 25 y/o associates making 200k+. I’m not as concerned about the salary, but more concerned that the other people my age clearly have more of a “desirable skillset”, whether that be with deal experience, better analysis, etc. I’m worried that if I move on from my firm to a different/more traditional PC firm, I’ll be way below the level of what they’d be looking for experience wise.

Basically I’m just worried my skillset/hire-ability is way below what it should be at my age, and that my compensation reflects that. Would love to know what people think I can do to make myself more valuable going forward, or if I’m overreacting. 

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