F500 Corporate Finance Rotation Program

I'm assuming no one has responded because you've asked stupid questions like this...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fp&a

Considering you didn't name a specific company, all you're going to get is generic responses about what each sub-division does. I'll give you one of those generic responses FP&A>the rest.

morgan90:

Hi all,

I have been posting this around for quite sometime now and so far, no one has responded. I hope someone here would be nice enough to help me answer this:

So, the company I'm looking into right now has a finance rotation program. The program would last for 2 years at least and you will be rotated into 5 different sub-divisions in finance:

• Financial Planning & Analysis (Corporate and/or Business Teams) • Investor Relations • Treasury • Corporate Accounting • Internal Audit

Would any of you care to explain what each sub division does? Which one of the sub-divisions is the hardest and easiest to get into? Which one of the sub-division deals a lot with acquisitions? Best and worst in terms of career growth and opportunities? Opportunities to advance for each sub-division?

Many thanks for your help

Sorry for not responding earlier

FPA - Budgeting, planning and forecasting for your groups that you support. Sometimes, depending on the company, you can go into strategic positions within the division that will allow you to model long term projects, etc. Usually your first rotation, easy advancement, rotate out to a different division when you can ( but I wouldn't rotate into a full time position into any of the listed below)

IR - No idea

Treasury - A lot of accounting, not a lot of cash management as some who have you believe -- but I am sure this depends on the company, usually moderately easy to rotate into.

I'm not an expert in this, but I've been told by some it's great and others it's hell. Your choice, but it is hard to rotate to a different group after you've been in treasury for a while (3-5 years.

Corporate accounting -- Better know US GAAP. Most of this group is in charge of assembling financial statements for earnings release. Hope you like accounting.

Internal Audit - not sure, assuming it will be similar to other accounting departments

What you like doing is up to you, advancement is around the same for all of those positions at the entry-level. You gotta do what you like. If you eventually want to be a CFO, I'd get experience in corp accounting and FPA and take a full time position in FPA after.

Thank you all for the information. The company is a tech company. Not as big as Microsoft, but pretty decent. It has around 7000 employees.

Another question I have would be which sub-division then among all of those that handles acquisitions? I know another member harvardgrad08 has mentioned some divisions called corp development and corp strategy, but I don't see anything like that in the job description.

Thanks

At my company, Corporate Development rolls up into Treasury, but I think that is the exception rather than the norm.

Internal audit deals with making sure everyone's process is efficient/error proof. Decent exposure to other business units and depending on which audit you're staffed on, could be good work.