The world of modelling...too late?

Hey all,

Been working in IB for almost two years now - have had my fair share of ups and downs but now I’m coming up to my final half a year or so before possible promotion.

I’m starting to regret not throwing myself into the deep end and master my modelling skills as much as I should have. My general understanding of valuation has naturally developed to the point where I can make sense of things and understand what needs to be achieved. Have had a fair amount of valuation work involving basic concepts (AVP, DCF, SOTP, benchmarking etc.) but not so much on LBOs or merger modelling.

I can only be responsible for my own learning. There have been times where the opportunity to work on such projects arises but I have had to turn them down due to being swamped with a bunch of other technical work (biotech/pharma type projects). We covered a lot of the content in our graduate training programme but naturally theoretical concepts are not entirely applicable to practical real-life approaches I feel.

My question is - what would be the best way to catch-up on these skills over the next 8 months? We have a training seminar coming up on one of these concepts (my prayers were answered!) so am hoping that upon completion I can ask my staffer to send me any related work so I can actually practice and build on this.

Am interested in learning about your experiences and challenges that you faced in this regard.

Thanks all!