Digging out of a huge mistake- Advice Needed
So the past 3 months have probably been the roughest 3 months of my life, and I'm 100 percent to blame on this one. While I'll probably receive some judgement on this one, I wanted to get some advice as well as possibly share my story as forewarning to those who come after me. Strap in, get your popcorn, and pepper your angus.
So I began my career with a large IT consulting group. The pay was awful ( really bad) and the hours were Bankerish. They are very well known as a sweat shop, and were the only offer I had coming out of school even though had a decent GPA ( non target school) After 8-9 months I asked my manager If i could move into sales. They were hiring sales people from anywhere, and they were all making hand over fist money. Far more money at the time than I was. I was told this wasn't an option, because I was going to be on this client for at least another year to two. A few weeks later I received an offer to intern with a mid market investment bank doing M&A for TMT sector. For better or worse, I stepped out of a FT role to intern with a bank. I had wanted to do M&A when i graduated, and had worked so hard just to get an offer coming from a total non target university.
The internship was great, and I gained a lot of experience. I was able to work on a ton of models, decks, and was part of cold calling at the C level. As a small office, we had some amazing deal flow going on. ( I was told this by like 3 bankers after the internship) Sadly, no offer was made to any of the interns at the end. I did end up with letter of recommendation though. This means I was entering the Holiday season unemployed, and spent most of my time more focused on a job hunt than spending time with family the way it was meant to be.
I've been looking for work since this point. When I started, I focused only on investment banks. This quickly became no longer viable, and has evolved in working my way back into the idea of going after enterprise tech sales. The bright side is my bank focused on TMT for consulting, data analytics, and cloud solution companies. The deals I worked on were 20 to 200 million. This looks very good in comparison to someone without a finance background and or no sales experience. The down side now is having one 9 month job and one 3 month IBD internship. What do you think the best way to address this is in interviews/ applying for jobs? Right now, I focus on how I was looking for something that was a bit more competitive and results driven, and that I wanted to step back to learn a skill set that I thought would be valuable in my career. As I move forward, I need to land something that will remain solid for the next 2 to 3 years.... If i'm ever going to push again for banking, It will be after a target MBA program. I was in a rush to be successful. In the long term the skill set might benefit me, but the risk I took to achieve it might not be worth the award short term. .....
