BIWS for PE recruiting?

I suppose it wouldn't hurt but you're really going to need to understand the models at a pretty deep level if you want to be successful in PE recruiting. I can't comment on how good BIWS would be in particular but I can say that you should probably supplement your study prep with some sort of modeling aide if you don't have a co-worker that is willing to spend time to teach you.

Having sampled several of these programs between shelling out $ of my own and doing some of these programs as part of training at work... I'd say the following:

1. If you're already working in banking, these are a complete waste of money; if your firm is paying, it makes a better case but its still a waste of time. I'd probably speculate that you'll get little to nothing out of it.

2. If you're in college or in operations or something... the biggest benefits are: (a) you get your hands on a model to fuck around with... which nowadays isn't that hard to do anyway (b) you can put it on your resume which to be 1 million % clear, is about as impressive as hocking a loogie in your breast pocket.... but -- and this is just my opinion -- if you're coming from a non-traditional background it does demonstrate to people that you're proactive and hungry and willing to take initiative to learn and develop the skills necessary to achieve your career goals. (c)that being said, the main drawback is if you're in college or not in banking, these programs aren't cheap; some of these guys also severely over promise on job placement and the value of their brand (both of which are not worth next to nothing, they are literally worth nothing)

In my opinion the best way to learn is to take a fairly simple nuts and bolts business (manufacturing, for example), get a 10K and a solid research report (if you can get your hands on), read through it, spread the 3 historical financial statements from the K, try to link up the 3 statements so it works/makes sense to you. Practice that a few times until you get the hang of it. Then move on to actually building the projection side of the model and making sure it links properly, BS balance and the model is dynamic. Once you have that down. Re-visit how you built your model... which inputs are driving it etc... Then layer in the actual LBO part of the model. Throughout all of this I would refer to one of the greatest free financial modeling resources out there (and I would argue better than BIWS, WSP etc, even if you had to pay for it) which is macabacus (www.macabacus.com).

Not useful for PE recruiting if you're already in banking because

1) the case study modeling tests you have to do for recruiting are very simple. Lots of them are template models where you just fill in some numbers. For the ones that make you build a model from scratch, you need to come up with your own high level and simplified LBO model that you can do in ~45 minutes

2) most of the interview is not going to be about model mechanics. It'll be about analyzing companies and how to think about investment opportunities on a qualitative level. BIWS does not teach you that.