Anyone have insight into what a typical career progression looks like for investment strategy/research roles? For context, it's for a large lifeco and focused entirely on CRE debt/equity.
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It can be a tough transition for a mid-career professional. I spent the first half of my career in strategy/research, but couldn't land a job on the investment/development side directly. Eventually, I got my MBA which finally enabled my transition. I have friends/colleagues that successfully made a transition earlier in their careers (from research to acquisition/development analyst), but if you stick around in research too long, you get pigeonholed. If you enjoy research and excel, you can find yourself in senior level roles with a seat at the investment committee for some great shops (I know more than a handful of people that followed this path). Those less successful often end up doing research for brokerage firms.
Its not a bad place to start for the first few years of your career - pretty common starting place for a transition into AM and development (going straight to acquisitions can be tough). If you enjoy the work, as the other poster said it can be a great career path as well with potential to end up on IC or in research at a brokerage or consultancy.
It's becoming increasingly fascinating and challenging work with the advent of machine learning and AI if you can get a role at the bigger shops that invest in this type of research and have the competencies (programming) to support it. Pension funds and large REPE shops are now running machine learning and AI models to mine data from MLS services, CoStar, Yardi, etc., compile the data, and spit out insights to guide portfolio management, pipeline identification, and so on.
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