There is a new Wharton & WallStreetPrep PE Certificate that costs roughly 5k. Doesn’t seem to offer much placement opps post program. What are your thoughts?
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I have no clue what that entails, or why it would cost $5k, but I have never seen a resume and taken any of those "certifications" into consideration. There are enough free resources to give you the technical knowledge to pass interviews and have baseline knowledge to be competent in the role.
I've led IB intern/analyst and PE associate recruiting.
Mind if i pm? curious ab PE analyst recruiting from liberal arts background
Taking this right now. Week #1 and the first module is in broken English.
Dude, 5k for a wharton degree? Sounds like super value.
You can literally buy a Harvard Online course for 70$. But it doesn't mean that you graduated from Harvard. Same here
Waste of money - will not get you into PE
All certificate programs are fucking jokes and will not help you get a job because they have no filtering mechanism and only show that you were able to shell out $XXXX for the program. They are purely an extra revenue source for the schools that give them out and provide nothing of value unless you're say, a STEM student from a good school who happens to be interested in PE/VC/whatever and used it as a way to familiarize yourself with the terminology (but even then you will look silly because you could have done so for free or by buying something cheaper like a WSO prep course).
I help manage my firms recruiting (multiple ASO/AN hires over the last 12 months) and have never passed someone beyond the resume screening who did one of these programs, no matter if it was from Wharton/HBS/Stanford. Save your money.
Enrolled in this right now, i work in asset management at a ~80 person tech focused growth equity firm (i.e. valuations/portfolio management / middle-frontish office because of fundraising cross over - but i'm not on deals) - adding input for any prospective students:
- I have an undergrad business / finance degree from a top 10 school
- I'm an 2 years out of college and my employer paid for this because each team has a continuing education budget and this looked interesting
- Most enrolled seem to be students or later stage operations career folks
- There are networking opportunities (i.e. linkedin group / slack channel / meetups) but i don't think people in this program are generally on the deals side, there are a hand full of 1st or 2nd year IB analysts who are trying to do the move to PE (I personally think PE firms will see this as a + if you're already in IB but also feel like it'd be better to just spend your time being a successful IB analyst)
- The commitment is more than I expected, my weeks are 50-60hours and this adds another 10ish hours but also you can get away with not watching all the content if you have some experience, the course is graded on a 75% pass on the 8 exams given
- I'm 4weeks through the 8weeks of materials - so far it's a decent overview of PE that wasn't given at an undergraduate level but the type of day-to-day training you need for any PE job is really specialized to the type of firm and no course is going to give you that the way on the job will
- The program itself is still very much new, there are spelling mistakes in the quizzes and it is kinda here and there on what is repurposed Wall Street Prep videos vs newly created Wharton content (slides given are inconsistent in format) - My two cents so far are that this is an ok intro into PE and there is technical content like LBO modeling, but this is really just continuing education content, idk if this is a way to "break into PE" on the deals side. (edit - i wouldn't pay for this on my own though)
happy to answer any questions
How did it work out for you so far?
considering this course, let me know if your perception changed once you finished the course?
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