eFinancialCareers

A lot of people are wondering whether they should seek a CFA in place of the more traditional MBA. In large part, the answer depends on your focus. The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation has been enjoying a heightened profile and increased popularity in light of surging private equity activity. So far In 2007 - the program's 44th year - 140,000 people from 156 countries have registered to sit for the... Read more

Making the jump from Operations to front office management often brings with it a healthy dose of bumps. Factors like education and perceived skill can pigeon-hole candidates, forcing them to overcome the stigmas associated with years spend in the back office. The good news? It can be done. Doug Rickart, of Robert Half International in Minneapolis, argues the stigma associated with Operations jobs no longer exists. "There are a lot of... Read more

If you're in transition and recruiters and hiring managers are returning your calls for the first time in awhile, prepare for sticker shock. The compensation you earned a few years ago may no longer be anywhere near what similar roles are paying today. On the bright side, a rebound in financial hiring is increasingly apparent. But forget the headlines about seven-figure bonus guarantees for MD-level rainmakers. Down in the trenches, both... Read more

Many junior-level Wall Streeters look on an MBA as their ticket onto the fast track. But experts warn against thinking an MBA alone can open doors. Only a dozen or so business schools, the ones making up the top tier of MBA programs nationwide, can confer instant credibility to candidates seeking their first bulge-bracket investment banking job. But if your career seems stuck in the slow lane, and Harvard or Columbia... Read more

Having spent the last six months of my life on a fairly concentrated job search - I'm looking for a position as a financial writer or communications professional - it's become obvious to me there are parallels between finding the perfect job and finding the perfect date or future mate. Both are sales games of a sort. Both are challenging right now, with the job scene an employer's market, and the... Read more

Age discrimination in hiring is a topic that reliably gets opinions flowing – sometimes to the point of boiling over. Reaction here and elsewhere to "Finessing Your Age on a Resume," an eFinancialCareers News story by contributing writer James Rubin, is a case in point. Citing the views of three resume-advice book authors, that Oct. 29 article suggested older candidates omit some dates from their resume to avoid being screened... Read more

As more Wall Street firms make use of psychological testing, candidates do have options. Here are some of them. More Wall Street firms are giving job candidates personality tests. If you're required to take one while competing for a position, are there any ways to maximize your opportunities and avoid any pitfalls? It won't help to prepare in the conventional sense by studying or rehearsing, as you would do before an interview,... Read more

After fielding too many cold calls from headhunters, some cynics might argue it’s not so much “how to choose a recruiter,” as “how to avoid being chosen.” But that’s just the cynics. There's no doubt that if you want to change jobs, it helps to be proactive. So how do you choose? Belinda Martin, manager at the London financial services recruitment company Joslin Rowe, offers advice on how to choose the... Read more

Chris Gardner, whose life and career as a stockbroker was the basis for the film The Pursuit of Happyness, says the key to success lies in choosing work that you love. “Do something that you love,” Gardner told eFinancialCareers when asked for his most important piece of advice about building a Wall Street career. “Find something you love, and be bold enough to go do it. If you don’t love it,... Read more

A new government lawsuit against Merrill Lynch provides a fresh reminder that blindly participating in the less polite side of your workplace culture can damage your career. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Merrill under the Civil Rights Act Tuesday, based on a quant analyst's complaint that he was fired after being verbally harassed about being an Iranian and a Muslim. Merrill has denied the allegations, and the five-page EEOC... Read more

As Wall Street resizes itself, applying for jobs while unemployed appears set to become far more ordinary - maybe even respectable. Given all that's going on with layoffs and rumors of layoffs, this may be a good time to jot down the lessons I drew from a recent job search, which took far longer than expected. More than a year ago, after nine years as an analyst of varied fixed-income markets and... Read more

Do you feel guilty for performing a role that might otherwise go to someone younger than you? If you're reading eFinancialCareers, you'll almost certainly say "no." But your answer won't sit well with some opinion leaders. In her final column in Newsweek in May, famed essayist Anna Quindlen wrote that baby boomers (the generation born between 1946 and 1964) "have created a kind of bottleneck, in the work world, in politics, in... Read more

An (anonymous female) contributor explains to our London correspondent why there aren't more women in hedge funds. I don't have a finance background - I grew up in the country and started out as a trader bidding grain before moving into financial arbitrage. From there I went to Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns as a prop trader before setting up with a colleague in 1998. It was incredibly difficult to get... Read more

How should financial institutions receiving taxpayer funds compensate their employees? That question is igniting a heated debate in Washington and on Wall Street, which will soon reverberate around the world. The viewpoint that's gaining momentum right now could make it difficult for banks and entities like American International Group to ever re-emerge as viable institutions with no government ties. The viewpoint was expressed most clearly by New York State Attorney General Andrew... Read more

Maybe, just maybe, America's historic elevation of Barack Obama to president-elect will take the edge off the blood-lust that's being directed against just about anyone working in the financial services industry. Or maybe it won't. Both economically and spiritually, it's ugly out there, and it's going to get uglier. People seized between the jaws called pain and fear rarely act from their best impulses. Instead, they tend to lash out at... Read more

If I had given up at any time during my job search, I would not have found a job, received a second round of publicity for my success and perseverance, or ended up where I am today. My experience illustrates why it is so important to keep your eyes on your goal and maintain the determination to reach it. I never stopped sending out resumes, even when I received very... Read more

I ended last week's column with a promise to address two high-risk (to put it generously) answers I've seen others recommend for certain job-interview questions that may signal age discrimination. One such question is: "Aren't you overqualified?" A user of our sister site, JobsintheMoney, offered a suicidal comeback he says is favored by the Financial Executives Networking Group, a respected organization that's been around since 1991. "We believe that the best way... Read more

The financial industry is a big playing field. As domains go, the type of specific work varies greatly, and what is applicable to some IT professionals may not be applicable to others. Here's a primer. In order to put things in perspective: I write code for distributed enterprise trading systems. From the perspective of a techie, this amounts to writing tons of highly multi-threaded client-server code. While the code ranges from... Read more

Where experience is concerned, more isn’t always better. Often it's worse. That's one lesson I drew from my own extended search for new employment after being laid off by a boutique in 2006. An employer who posts an opening calling for "three to five years experience" in a particular sub-specialty might be leery if an applicant has 12 years. In such cases, a candidate’s best bet is to state an experience... Read more

In a scene from the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, Johnny Iselin is shown seasoning his steak with ketchup from Heinz - a company long identified with the slogan "57 varieties." In the next scene Iselin informs a Senate hearing, "I am holding in my hand a list of 57 Communists who work in the Defense Department." That semi-fictional incident has parallels with a present-day tug-of-war over lists of purported... Read more