I need some advice about a career move
Hi everyone,
I just join this forum in hopes of gaining some insight from everyone. So a little background about myself: I currently just turned 24 years old. I work at EY for the past year and a half in their assurance practice and am a CPA. I went to a top Accounting school and hold a dual bachelors degree in public accounting and finance. I am currently a CFA level II candidate for June 2020. So I am looking into other career paths. My most favorable would be Investment banking (I know typical). I have such a strong interest in the field and would love to move into it. Of course I know how difficult this is. My second career path that i would love to do would be strategy consulting. I think this path would be decently easier since EY has a consulting practice that i could eventually rotate into. My third career path would be to try and go somewhere on the buy side or even a rating agency in a research analyst position. I would love to deal with distressed credit or securitized products. I know this is also very hard with no IB experience. I just got accepted to NYU Stern’s part time MBA program as at this point in my life I simply can not afford to take 2 years off from work and go full time as I really wish i could. I have read a lot of people saying it is not worth it for attempting to make the career jump as the PT students have a more limited career services at there disposal. I have read some stories of people doing the part time MBA and networking heavy into an associate position at a BB. I would love to go to a boutique firm like Holihan Lokey. Any insight/advice would be super appreciated! Thank you all!
Why don't you try reaching out to headhunters, in house recruiters (if you can figure out who they are), and your general network of IB analysts and see if you can try to lateral into an IB analyst position? I'm not saying it's guaranteed to work out, but that would be my first step.
You are right! I will definitely start to aggressively network to try and break into an analyst position at an investment bank.
When I read your post I'm wondering why you're taking the CFA exams. The CFA charter was designed for jobs in asset management. It's applicable to your goal of working at a rating agency in a research position. It might also be useful when working in consulting if you're advising finance companies. But for your first priority goal of working in IB the CFA won't do much. It's taking time away from networking and preparing for interviews. Your interviewers will be a lot more interested in accounting related topics for which you already have the CPA. So if you have lots of free time, sure, continue with the CFA exams. But otherwise there are more productive things you can do to break into IB. Besides, having CFA level I already has signalling value for your second and third priority and you can always do the other levels later if you need them. Note: I'm registered for level I and want to work in asset management.
EY doesn't do much or any strategy consulting. They are mostly consulting on implementation, risk and operations. I did an internship last year in EY's financial services advisory. An example of a project was to advise a financial services firm on the implementation of automation software and coordinate the roll-out across different offices of the firm. EY recently acquired Parthenon which is geared more towards strategy consulting. There is a thread on WSO where people discussed whether it is true strategy consulting like the MBB firms offer. Link: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/ey-ots-rebranding-to-ey-partheno… (Because you're new here: MBB stands for McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, the three top management consulting firms.)
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