Career Advice - Staying or Leaving

Hi Guys,

I really need some advice from you. My background is 5 years Corporate Accounting and 1 year hedge funds finance. I currently work for a large hedge fund, the firm is pretty hard to get in. My job is relatively stable. But I do not see any potential for me to move around, the firm structure is very stable, there are not too many opportunities for young people to move around, especially, in the back office.

I am afraid the longer I stay in finance, the harder for me to move towards my longer term goal. My long term goal is to become a research analyst, should I move into a small or medium size funds and get more exposure to products? Does anybody who works in a small or medium size hedge funds work to support multi-departments, e.g. finance and operations and others? My current job is very well defined in terms of responsibilities.

Thank you for your input.

 
Best Response

First off, to be a research analyst you have to have good grammar as well as an ability to clearly express yourself to make your readers understand what you are trying to convey. You sir, have failed terribly at both of these skills in your relatively simple posting. So the first point of advice I would like to offer is to learn how to write.

Other than that I would imagine that in the Hedge Fund space (where I have never worked) it is even harder to make a move out of the back office than the BBs because HFs have an unlimited pool of applicants with research experience at BB firms. Unlike BBs who do not mind training people with no experience, I have never heard of Hedge Funds doing any training of that sort.

If you haven't gone to B-school yet, perhaps that is a route that you can take. You can also try to apply to bigger firms where research is a primary business (such as ratings agencies). But like I mentioned earlier, work on your writing before you do anything else.

 

Hi trailmix8, I appreciate your comment on my writing skills, that is a good point. I will certainly work on it.

Another advice is pretty useful as well - to apply rating agencies. Do you know if rating agencies take in people with no experience ?

 

Not sure how rating agencies recruit. I imagine that just because of their sheer size, they look at all sorts of applicants. Figuring out how to get an interview with one of them is up to you, visit their website, see if you can meet folks that work there, etc... If you do happen to put yourself in a position to apply there, they will want to see some sort of evidence that you want to work in a research role, I would probably get the CFA1 done, as that small milestone will at least show that you are serious about switiching careers. I know for Goldman research, they require their analysts to get their CFAs before they allow them to move to associate.

 

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