Best age to start working as an investment banking associate?
This question is for people who used business schools to switch their careers and move to investment banking. Most of them applied for summer associate positions and ended up receiving full time offers. I realize that among those, many already had 6 to 9 years of experiences before B-Schools or it might take them up to 11 years (after adding 2 years for MBA degree) to become an Associate at BB, a position which many Ivy kids achieved at 24.
I am wondering, is this worth it? I understand that those people may climb the ladder better at IB and become VP sooner than other young kids (based on their network and experience) but still, I think the opportunity cost is really huge. Also, for people who want to work in IB post MBA, how many years of experience they should have (with the underlying assumption that they could land MBA business schools<br /> ">M7 school offer) pre-MBA?
You make this too complicated. If you have choice, become IB associate as early as you can. If you don't have choice, becoming IB associate at 30 yrs old is better than still working in back office at 30 yrs old (assume pay is your goal instead of work/life balance).
Also, you overstated avg MBA ages. M7 MBA has average working experience 4-5 years. People target at banking are usually on the younger side of spectrum. So most post-MBA associate are around 28 - 30 yrs old, which is not too bad compared to A2A (25-26), considering MBA has value other than job placement.
@FinancierExtraordinaire: I assume that as long as one can get into M7 schools, do intensive network and utilize career services wisely, he or she is still be able to get into elite boutiques (Lazard, Evercore, Jefferies etc, if not BBs) with 3-4 years of irrelevant experience pre-MBA right?
@youayou: Yeah I agree. I am wondering, if you are 29 post-MBA, you would rather go with a senior financial analyst position (kind of leadership development program, say Amazon, Microsoft) or investment banking associate position at BB?
it is really depends on your goal. If you want to have family/kids right after MBA, you probably can't do a 80 hours per week job. On the other hand, if you just want best career in finance in terms of pay/prestige, banking associate is still superior than most corp jobs. Couple of reasons:
pay is significant higher. it is like 100K difference in first year and even larger in mid-career. Late career is difficult to compare.
exit opportunity is much broader. Although people here bash about associate exit opportunity all the time, it is not that bad. It is just not as standard/structural as analyst exit. You can still change your mind as associate and plenty of chances are available (albeit not as much as analyst), including corp dev/strat. In contrast, once you are in corp role, it is very difficult to switch to advisory side.
just like analyst program but to a lesser extent, associate program is a good way to learn a lot about one industry or one product in short period of time.
@FinancierExtraordinaire: Correct me if I am wrong, but based on my observation, I see that most of the guys who successfully moved from irrelevant roles to IB roles without MBA could only work at small & medium banks (of course) whereas M7 B-schools could provide candidates with on campus interview opportunities from BB or elite boutiques. I am quite positive about my chance to get into those schools though (think international background/high GMAT/leadership etc). My pre-MBA experience will be with Big 4 Accounting (not Audit, and I am starting in this July). So what do you think about my chance to get into BB post-MBA?
If you're recruiting from an M7 school, don't worry. Just follow the well-worn path, do the requisite networking, and you'll do just fine.
I hear some princeton kids directly go to associates with no massive work experience
I heard some Harvard kids go straight to VP.
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