Should I move into boutique Ops?

Hi guys, just was hoping for some advice from the community. I currently work for a data aggregator in executive compensation as a data analyst lead. The pay is okay in terms of what it is, but got offered a job to work in ops at a boutique PE firm, doing data and becoming a "financial/operations analyst". I really want to get into finance, but after hearing mostly horror stories and some diamonds in the rough don't know what to weigh in at. What should I do, is there any way to break into FO because I'm working for a small shop compared to BB. Will I die a slow and painful death? Also will studying for the CFA charter currently will help my options?

4 Comments
 
Best Response

Well CFA won't do much for you unless you're looking to be in investment management of some sort. Even then it's tough because at your point you'll need that career changing milestone. Most people do MBA to try to make that career jump to FO.

Seems like your best path to avoid all the debt of an MBA (assuming you're interested in PE) is to just take an non traditional path and pick up the job at the PE firm and just try to make friends with the associates and ask them questions about what they do and possibly they will show you sometime and the more you learn about the business the more you can possibly help out and integrate yourself into their tasks. I suppose you could then leverage this type of experience into a possible FO role but it would never be BB or elite boutique.

You'd be looking at an interesting path but if you show drive and initiative and work hard then you can break in eventually.

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