From Engineering to Financial Services Question (Yea another one)

Greetings

I am a Civil Engineer who's interested in making a transition into financial services. No previous investment/finance work experience. Just Engineering related work for internships and obviously my current engineering job.

In one of my local job fairs (major midwest city), I approached a recruiter with Wells Fargo with my interests and motivation to pursue such a change in my career. She says i have the opportunity to potentially be in the candidate pool for a trading assistant position (where she thought i had more chance) and a analytics position. I have experience with Python, C++, SQL and Excel Spreadsheets with VBA programming to boot. The recruiter warned that the ass. trading position would be low salary starting out ~40k. The recruiter also pointed out that with Wells Fargo, I would be getting my foot in the door and they would pay for my MBA or at least most of it. Im curious to the exposure I would be getting working with their trading team? I don't mind the hours as long as the future opportunities would be well worth it. Coming from a non traditional background and a non-target school, i don't have much leverage at all.

I also applied to a major local brokerage firm to a fixed income research analyst position specializing in municipal bonds. I believe my Civil Eng. background fits pretty well with this position.

For a non traditional business degree and no previous work in the financial services industry? What position should i strongly pursue out of the three?

Thanks!
Joe

2 Comments
 

The position you should go for obviously depends on your skills. What you need to do is to make a list of the skills you have used at your job. Then, go and look at job postings for the same type of jobs you're interested in (in this case, trading assistant, the analytics position, and the fixed income research one) - try to find at least 5 for each of them (10 is obviously better) and make a list of the skills that are consistently emphasized. Compare the lists and the one with the most overlap is the one you should pursue.

 
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