I graduated from a target school and was hired into an analyst role in the corp dev team at a SMid-cap biopharma. I was promoted to senior analyst recently and am now approaching the 2 year mark at my company.
However, in the past year, the corp dev team has been de-prioritized relative to the R&D team, especially from a junior perspective, as our company has shifted strategy from acquiring commercial stage specialty pharmas to early stage biotech. As a result, I'm now considering switching out of my industry.
I've been interested in breaking into a corp dev role in the tech industry. I had a few tech corp dev interviews in the past year that have progressed fairly well, but the common issue that came up was that I didn't have direct experience working in the tech industry.
However, I've also had a few interviews with tech FP&A roles where the company never expressed any issues with my lack of industry experience. This signaled to me that FP&A may be a way for me to get the foot in the door to build tech industry experience and eventually get back into corp dev. However, I have seen multiple posts that have illustrated the difficulty of transitioning from FP&A.
I'd like to get people's thoughts on my proposed path to transition from one industry to another. What challenges do you foresee? What alternatives are out there that might make this easier?
Thanks everyone for the help in advance
what's type of tech companies did you interview with for CD roles - are we talking blue chip names? if it's blue chip, then ok that may be a fair since they have ever tech banker and their mother probably interested in them. in that case i would just refocus on CD roles at smaller/lesser known tech firms.
Not blue chip names, I know I can't compete against the likes of TMT bankers. I've been focusing on smaller tech firms for the past year
something seems off. are they concerned about your experience in modeling out certain types of tech-related businesses (i.e. SaaS) or industry experience? tech is so broad so impossible to know what companies you are referring to....
As a SFA, your primary responsibility would not be driving strategy so it does not make sense they would ding you on your limited industry experience. however, concerns about your experience with modeling out SaaS businesses, could be legitimate....impossible to know with such limited info.
Bump
I work in strategy at a F100... from my perspective its very difficult if not impossible to transition from FP&A to corp dev. Our corp dev team almost exclusively hires from IBD. However I'm in consumer/retail and not tech.. just my .02.
Understood, that's been my impression as well. Sounds like it may be better to stay in my current corp dev role rather than transition to FP&A
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