IB M&A vs PE Skillset
Hi guys,
I'd like to know whether there's a difference in the skills you develop working in M&A and PE. How transferable are they between one industry and the other?
Appreciate the responses.
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As a junior person, very little difference. Banking in general emphasizes numerical precision and accuracy over bigger-picture thinking (at a junior level), but if you're a curious person you can still get exposure to many of the same things and develop a similar skill set.
PE professionals like to talk-up the "investment mindset", but as a junior person many of the tasks are not too different and a lot of that is window dressing. The difference becomes more noticeable as your get more senior and then slims again. Probably the biggest level of difference is VP -- banker VP is just executing processes, while senior PE VP & principal can be functioning at junior partner level.
For senior MDs in PE / banking, probably little difference in caliber of people but the role is different. Bankers get paid based on volume of deals (and deal fees). PE gets paid on super valuable deals (not necessarily doing a lot of shitty deals, but that happens too).
Hey, thanks for the response.
The reason I'm asking is because my long-term goal is to venture into impact investing. What I hear is that both the M&A route and PE route can lead you towards that.
I'm trying to evaluate which of the two would be better suited for developing the necessary skill set. What I understand is that PE is largely focused on buy side whereas M&A mostly deals with sell side activity. In such a scenario, would PE be the better alternative because of the emphasis on actual investment related activities?.
If someone could shed some light on this, it would be extremely helpful. I'm fairly new to this, so my understanding could very well be flawed.
Thanks
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