Best/most respected financial modeling course/certificate
I'm currently a Senior Associate in FDD/TAS at an accounting firm. Once I get to 1.5 years in FDD, which will be this summer/early fall, I'm going to try to move into the typical sought after exit ops like IB, Corp Dev, or MM PE.
Given I'm in FDD, I know one of the things I am missing form my skill set is financial modeling. When it comes to the various courses and certificates available, is there one that is the best, or that companies actually value compared to others, that will definitely make it work taking? The ones that I am mainly looking at are from Wall Street Prep (Modeling Premium Package, $424 after a discount), Wall Street Oasis Elite Modeling Package ($97, sale ends soon), and Financial Edge (The Investment Banker, $299).
bump
I don’t think you’re looking at this the right way: no company will value the fact that you’ve done a specific online course vs another since you won’t have used it in the professional setting.
It’s only a tool to:
Point 2) will then likely trigger technical questions, which means that 1) really matters.
I couldn’t compare them, but they’re all recognised brands with similar contents.
Absolutely this.
These courses will teach you very basic financial modeling over a few hours, none of it will be anywhere near enough reps to compare it to doing financial modeling in a real-life scenario. I would not put modeling, etc as a skill on your resume - if I see that I am absolutely asking you more technicals than someone who admits they don't use it but are willing to learn.
I would view it more as a tiny thing that shows interest and effort rather than truly building a skillset or getting any real value out of them. In that way, they are all similar. I don't think they add much incremental.
I appreciate the input. Obviously, I'm not expecting Goldman to blow my phone up once I complete one of the courses. I just think it wouldn't hurt to have since a common thing I see about coming from FDD is the lack of modeling experience, so it'd be useful for on the job and in interviews if need be. Since it seems like it doesn't matter too much, I'll go with the WSP one since to me it's the most widely known brand.
Patrick is punching the wall rn.
a lot of firms on the street (incl. JPM) use FinancialEdge to train first year analysts. its good and teaches you the basic / fundamentals, quite lengthy tho
BIWS is good too, can get quite in depth / granular which can be helpful for some parts of the jobs (and especially for interviews). they do a lot of diff case studies with varying scenarios (e.g. multiple LBO case studies with earn outs, mgmt options / rollovers, debt payment schedules etc which was very helpful for me to get reps as it is comprehensive - not something u get at financialedge). I relied on BIWS a lot when prepping for buyside
but i would say for basic and fundamentals financialedge might hv the edge. ofc none of this will compare vs. when u are on the job (as the majority of the time during the job u will spend time on the operating model side which is industry / company specific.. not something u learn off a modelling course). DCFs will make up like 10% of the time u spend when doing a model
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