Are technical skills needed before starting off as a first year IB analyst, or are the skills taught on the job and the technical interview is just a weed out phase?

We all know that besides the behavioral, any prospective analyst needs to ace their technicals to be seriously considered for a role.

But when you hit the desk as a first year, how much technical skill is needed to do your day to day from the get go? Are you immediately thrown into the fire and expected to build flawless models or are you slowly eased into it?

Asking because I have an interview for an IB analyst but haven’t had too much modeling skills so wanted to see what it would be like to try and break in from a different field.

Thanks!

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They'll definitely take a while to truly ramp you up, everyone knows you're basically useless for the first few months. Even those of us with plenty of previous internships - you just can't possibly know how a particular group will prefer things done, or specific technical nuances to the industry/product you're covering. That said though, it definitely helps to have some technical experience, and it just means that a month or two after starting, you might be able to contribute a little more than the person who is learning it all from scratch. I think given 6 months to a year though, those differences mostly disappear. There's a learning curve to banking, but once you get up it, it becomes repetition (to an annoying extent...) and all your analyst class will be capable unless there's a true underperformer who just isn't learning things.

I would do your best to learn some of that stuff in advance, but it'll all be taught to you eventually so don't stress out over it.

 

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