Most Valuable Hard Skills?

Ability to abstract legal documents/contracts is important. Who bears performance risk, how is cash flow distributed, what happens when bad acts occur, what triggers bankruptcy, etc... This includes understanding Word and how to work red-lined documents.

Also obviously PowerPoint skills - how to create clean concise slides without information overload.

Being able to absorb large amounts of quantitative and qualitative information, form an opinion, and express those thoughts in a way that answers the MD's inevitable question "So what?"

Not what one typically thinks of as useful hard skills, but I think that being able to read fast and being able to type fast are highly valuable assets. Most people can think far faster than they type, and with how long the average person spends typing these days, a 20% increase in typing speed could well translate into a ~5% or more increase in productivity. Same thing with reading.

Besides Python, Haskell, SQL, C++, the most important skill is being social and knowing how to approach people. Treating people with respect and approaching them respectfully is the most important skill I ever learned in life and I think everyone should know how to behave properly.

To anyone saying Python, SQL, C++ etc., are beneficial in IBD, what the fuck are you talking about?

Critical Thinking.

So many people I've worked with simply, don't want to have to think and spend mental cycles working through an abstract problem that hasn't already been solved. It's easier for these individuals to learn by watching a more senior individual run through the motions of solving that problem than it is for them to spend the time to understand and attempt to solve. People who do this are stuck operating at a level of abstraction that neglects / discounts low-level fundamental knowledge. These people are often caught flat-footed in dynamic situations and tend to follow well trodden paths as opposed to operating confidently on sound ground.

Think critically, understand how shit works and solve for your own success.

Learn how to swing a golf club, and how hold a conversation for the duration of a golf round

Headlining and synthesizing key takeaways

How to write an email to co-workers instructing them to do something, without sounding like an asshole.

basic fucking logic and common sense

Do anyone buy this course? The WSO Investment Banking Interview Prep Course

I want to prepare my skills to get into investment banking. Is that useful?

How to talk as if your job is much more complicated than it actually is.

Excel and Powerpoint, I've worked in PE, Financial Consulting, Loan Portfolio Management, and CRE. Every place I worked (except PE) was severely lacking in simple things like how to format a deck properly and not merge and center stuff in Excel. The deck stuff was more a professionalism thing and the merge and centering bs I saw made it incredibly hard to consolidate data when working with national groups and large portfolios. Both of those things made me cringe when trying to a) send stuff to clients and b) do quick analysis on things that needed to go back to clients.

The excel stuff more than anything. It's key to meeting deadlines and leaving at a decent hour to be able to quickly derivate data from historical or aggregated workbooks. It's also super useful to be able to use special search functions on workbooks that were put together poorly. The alternative is spending hours manually searching these files for something that could've taken seconds if setup/managed properly and more importantly, wasting time that could be better allocated elsewhere.

Have never used either R, or Python, or Tableau, or SQL in investment banking (M&A) and 1.5 years on the buy-side (distressed debt). All plain Excel, being able to do research using Google and often time reading sources in a language I don't really know. Powerpoint is another big thing. It just requires a lot of stamina and being able to pay attention for extended periods of time (go get a prescription for this, it's easy). I'm in data science now (also financial institutions) and had to learn Scala, PySpark, and all cloud offerings from Amazon, MS, and Google. But it's a different story.

distilling information to the appropriate level so someone can make a decision