Corporate Development Analyst/M&A Analyst vs BIG 4 audit

Hi,

I have 2 career options right now and I'm not sure which one to choose. First one is Big4 audit. I've heard that it gives some exit opps, like controlling (mostly in accounting world). But, honestly, I'm not into accounting at all and I'm quite sure I will try to escape to more financial related jobs in the future. However, in my location there aren't many opportunities in this field so my choice is very limited. Second is Corporate Development Analyst in quite well known european company (absolutely not the scale of fortune 500). The list of responsibilities there is as follows: performing a competitive benchmark analysis by division/country, market research, new entry markets, product segments analysis and preparing acquisition documents. I think that the second option is far more interesting and I was wondering if there are any skills in there that can be related to other finance jobs (like IB or management consulting, etc.). I would really appreciate your advice.

3 Comments
 

First off, these are two completely different roles. Big 4 audit is a lot of 'checking boxes'. I did an internship at Big 4 audit and hated it (and all my friends who didn't look for other jobs after that still hate it).

Corp Dev is what a lot of IBers do later in their career so yes, corp dev has a lot of transferable skills. A lot of people also start in IB and go corp dev but there is not reason why you can't do the reverse.

 

Thank you for your answer. I was wondering whether this particular position is Corp Dev for real or just a fancy name and nothing more. Do you think that the list of mentioned responsibilities cover typical Corp Dev role? I think that there will be 0 exposure to things like valuation etc. - just research and preparing acquisition documents.

 
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