I find that the associates and AVPs realize early on who has a natural aptitude or interest for numbers and Excel, and who's better at the qualitative stuff. I've found that this played out in my firm and I've heard it mentioned sometimes on here too. One of my analyst buddies has been here a year and can barely compute a CAGR so he gets put on all the PP or Word stuff (proposals, pitchbooks, presentations, prospectuses, feasibility studies), whereas another can build massive models for companies with multiple subsidiaries from scratch and gets given that part of the work. This isn't super cut-and-dry, obviously; both work on models and comps and pitchbooks and documentation, but the roles are pretty clear, if not mentioned aloud.
I myself joined at the same time as another analyst and, realizing the importance of modeling skills for things like exit opps and general banking know-how early on, managed to establish myself as being good with Excel and models in general. I effing hate MS Word from the bottom of my heart, and I've thankfully been getting less bitchwork (give me a list of all the IPOs ever done in the region) and more relevant stuff. There's a good bit of documentation stuff too, but I try and get assigned to something more numerical as far as possible.
Does a similar dynamic play out in your firm?
individuals have different strenghts..mine happens to be presentation and deal neg. Can I do models and quant..sure but I am placed on the presentation side of deals.
I can deliver strong and that front, I know the numbers but communication is my real skill.
You need to be well-rounded however, do not get stuck in a "role" which you do not like, it will make you mis and you will quickly look for some other line of work.
Good Luck to you -
Yeah, it's funny. Sometimes people get pigeonholed for completely random reasons, like they worked on three of the same kind of project in their first two months and got a rep for being a Powerpoint guy or a memo drafter. Then the general thought is, "Well, modelers aren't good at qualitative stuff and vice versa, so this kid needs to stay away from models." Then, you guessed it, it ends up on the kid's annual review as a weakness. And all along the kid's building and taking apart models because it's his top talent. I saw something kind of like this with an analyst at my firm recently.
Sometimes this comes out in the wash, and sometimes it doesn't. Good luck with it.
I actually ended up being both worse and better off than your 2 friends: I basically became the, "does a seemingly infinite amount of work on no sleep with no complaints guy."
While this seems nice at first and let me get some good projects early on, it caught up with me eventually and now I anticipate being overwhelmed most of the time whenever I get new projects.
I'm glad I don't do 100% modeling or 100% PowerPoint work... it sounds nice to the uninformed to always be doing models, but eventually you get bored with it and realize most of the time it's not rocket science.
Staffers will always seek out the path of least resistance (e.g., giving presumed quant jocks primarily modeling work).
Assuming you want to acquire a well rounded skill set, the onus is really on you to pro-actively let senior folks know that you're looking to build a more diverse skill-set.
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