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Quants and data analysts may be locked in a battle for dominance with discretionary hedge fund managers, but those in traditional roles may secretly know that their days are numbered.

“I’ve had billion dollar portfolio managers tell me that they were studying a data science course at night school,” said Leigh Drogen, a former hedge fund CIO who now runs big data fintech firm Estimize. “These courses weren’t even related to finance, because they don’t exist yet.”

“Most discretionary fund managers think Python is a big snake,” adds Emmett Kilduff, a former Morgan Stanley equity capital markets banker who now runs big data firm Eagle Alpha. “They’ve never heard of web scraping, or other big data techniques. The skill-set just isn’t there.”

To quants and data scientists, discretionary fund management is “religion” predicated on gut feeling and faith. But in the vast majority of hedge funds and asset managers, they still hold all the cards. The problem is that this ‘them and us’ mentality means no one wins.

“Most hedge funds have a centralised team, where you have an overarching group looking for data, ingesting it and cleansing it. Then you hire data scientists and quantitative researchers to look for alpha opportunities and basically hand over an Excel spreadsheet to the portfolio manager who has no idea what to do with it,” said Drogen speaking at the Newsweek Artificial Intelligence in Capital Markets conference today.

Drogen’s theory is that PMs, data scientists and quants should all work together in ‘pods’. “The PM understands the trading strategies, can explain his understanding of stocks and where he sees alpha to a quant and data scientist who can mine and ingest the data to give them an edge,” he said.

Most fund managers have yet to grasp this. More to the point, when you’re talking about a large firm, trying to bring in so much scarce data science talent within so many different teams is just not feasible, said Kiduff.

“A centralised quant team supporting traditional expertise is the way to go right now,” he said.

The whole idea of blending fundamental knowledge with huge quant datasets – the quantamental approach – is also gaining traction. But even here it’s not simply a case of gaining access to these huge sources of data, it’s a more question of what you do with it and that requires an understanding of the underlying financial drivers.

“The truth of the matter about the quant versus fundamental debate is no one has figured out not only how to use data science to gain an insight, but how to turn that insight into action,” said Michael Beal, CEO of big data focused hedge fund Data Capital Management. “Closing that loop and turning it into money is the hardest part.”

Despite the ongoing debate, a lot of portfolio managers in discretionary hedge funds know that the landscape has shifted and are taking action to update their skill-set, said Drogen.

“You have portfolio managers with decades of experience attending courses in Python and R, or learning how to build a factor model,” he said.

The shift towards big data and artificial intelligence in hedge funds is being held up those working in the big jobs right now. “Religion worked for a while,” said A.J. DeRosa, head of global sales at big data firm Orbital Insight. “You’re dealing with egos and you’re dealing with people, so you need to be empathetic. But in five years’ time, they either become quants or quantamentals or they won’t be around anymore.”

The whole idea of discretionary hedge funds hiring a bunch of data scientists and PhDs then sticking them in a back room to work their magic is something that needs to change. The cultural shift is likely to be gradual, but by the time it happens a new breed of fund manager may be way ahead of them anyway.

“There are around 70 hedge funds who say they use big data, about 20 of them are really doing in and maybe a handful are any good at it,” said Beal.

One of these is Numerai, the Silicon Valley-based hedge fund run by 29-year-old South African Richard Craib. It uses thousands of freelance data scientists to create machine learning models that are then used to make trades. There are around 13,000 people competing against one another to create the best strategies – the prize being around $150k in bitcoin.

“One of our investors Howard Morgan – co-founder of Renaissance Technologies – stopped investing in quant funds for a few years. Hi logic was how can you compete with Two Sigma, which has 120 PhDs using data sets in ways that no one else can?” he said.

“But we have seven or eight employees and 13,000 data scientists all around the world building the hedge fund without us. We’re in a third wave and a new kind of hedge fund is being created.”

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Will senior bankers leave Deutsche Bank after this year’s miserable bonuses, or won’t they? And if they don’t, will banks anywhere ever need to pay “acceptable” bonuses again? It’s a question that at least one senior Deutsche Bank employee in New York City isn’t waiting to find the answer to.

Satish Ramakrishna has left Deutsche’s U.S. risk advisory business after twenty years. He’s off to Rutgers University, where he’ll be a visiting scientist in the physics department. In a 2014 interview, he described his job at at Deutsche Bank as trying to, “understand the liquidity and market risks in the portfolios that funds borrow against to figure out what could happen in market meltdowns (which happen rather more often than they used to) and minimize our chances of loss, while staying commercially relevant.”

Ramakrishna gained a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University but has been steeped in finance since joining Citi in 1994. While finance paid the bills, physics always appears to have been his passion: as an electronics student in India, Ramakrishna took extra physics classes even though they weren’t mandatory. With Deutsche’s bonuses down around 80%, it seems Ramakrishna decided that the opportunity of cost of leaving banking is low enough to walk away and commit to physics instead.

Before quitting, Ramakrishna had some advice for quants who want to work in finance. He told students at his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology, that students who want a quantitative job on Wall Street now need to know about finance too. “I got a job with almost no knowledge – just two months of reading a book on finance – that would be almost impossible now.”

Ramakrishna also said that quants on Wall Street can differentiate themselves with good communication: “You need to be able to say what you have to say without making it too complicated.”

Ultimately though, he said life is about doing what you’re interested in: “Find something that fascinates you. When you do, even if you don’t succeed as much as you possibly can, at least you’ll enjoy your life.”

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Photo credit: Advanced Theoretical Physics by Marvin (PA) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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In banking familiarity breeds contempt. Well, maybe ‘contempt’ is a bit strong, but familiarity or complacency can be a major problem for experienced bankers who change jobs, especially if this involves changing banks or (as in my case) moving to Hong Kong and then Singapore in the process.

As an experienced banking professional, you’ve likely built on your functional expertise and risen to the exalted heights of managing your own team. You understand your bank, its culture and processes, and you generally ‘know how to get things done’.

You’ve also developed a winning formula to success as a senior banker: your golden rules, your list of acronyms, and your toolkit of management models.

And then, you decide to take up a new banking job. You’re confident that with all your knowledge, you’ll be able to make an instant impact and prove your new boss is a genius for hiring you.

But after only a few weeks (or months) in your new role, you suddenly realise that things are not working out as you expected. Your colleagues don’t seem to understand your rules and your tools, and your models aren’t as effective as they once were.

Moreover, getting things done is taking much longer than it used to and you’re wasting a long time trying to find the right go-to person.

This can happen both when you change roles within a bank or when you join a new firm.

When I moved from New York to Hong Kong with HSBC as global head of client management, I was surrounded by a great team, but it still took much longer for me to get things done.

I didn’t have my familiar network around me in Hong Kong and my team and I weren’t on the same page, at least initially. I was used to making ‘half a request’ and have my team in the US know what to do next, whereas my new employees wanted to make doubly sure they always knew exactly what I wanted.

I soon realised that it would take time to align myself with them. As always, communication was absolutely key and by listening to my team they educated me and we were soon marching along together.

From this experience and others, I now know how to avoid what I call the ‘complacency trap’ in senior-level banking (i.e. behaving in a new job the same way as you did in your old one).

Firstly, assuming that you can roll out your old bag of tricks is a recipe for disaster. Your rules were successful in your previous job because you developed them to meet specific challenges which won’t exist anywhere else.

I also was certainly guilty of falling into the complacency trap when I moved to Deutsche Bank as global head of implementation and service. I turned up in February with my trusty tricks that had served me well at HSBC and I proceeded to bombard my team with a stream of ‘good ideas’.

But by May I was scratching my head because things weren’t working out. I had to recalibrate my approach, and with the help of colleagues I was then able to identify both quick wins and a successful long-term strategy.

Secondly, remember number the fifth point in management guru Stephen Covey’s book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’: “seek first to understand, then to be understood”.

This means spend time to understand your new bank. Understand its history, culture, strategies, and corporate language. Understand what models have been tried before and their level of success.

I was fortunate when I moved to Singapore in 2011 to join Standard Chartered as global head of service and solution delivery. One of my senior colleagues took me aside and recommended that I spend time to understand not just where the bank was at that point in time but how it had arrived there.

This was invaluable advice because it really helped me to put Stan Chart’s positives and negatives into an appropriate context. It also helped me to avoid proposing changes that had already been tried before!

Thirdly, let people get to know you. They might have heard things about you (good and bad) and it is important to make sure people know who you really are – how you like to manage and be managed.

Fourthly, try to avoid repeated references to your previous bank and team and how great things were there. One way of doing this is to encourage your new team to (gently) call you out when you do it. Perhaps even fine yourself and use the proceeds to treat your team.

To be honest, if I had put this one into practice my team would have been partying every Friday night, at least for the first month!

The key to being a successful senior banker isn’t to forget what made you successful. Rather, it’s to understand the context of your new role, so you only apply the ‘old rules’ that are appropriate, and you develop new ones to suit your new challenges.

Russell Graham is a partner at Asian transaction banking consultancy SkyTxB. His most recent job in banking was as global head of service and solution delivery at Standard Chartered.

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Bonuses at UBS weren’t bad this year: headhunters say the banks‘ traders and investment bankers were mostly happy. However, senior people are leaving.

You may not have noticed the exits because they’re not happening in London or New York – yet. They’re in Australia. In the past week, the Australian Financial Review reports that Dane Fitzgibbon, a UBS managing director (MD) and co-head of equity capital markets, has quit. So has the other co-head, Barry Sharkey. Fitzgibbon spent 13 years at UBS and is moving to Brisbane with his family. Sharkey spent 11 years at UBS and plans to spend time with his ‘four children and dog.’

The exits might simply be dismissed as post-bonus retirements of the kind we’re already seeing among partners at Goldman Sachs. Except the AFR thinks there’s more to it than that. It says that Fitzgibbon and Sharkey’s exits coincide with the vesting of options issued to UBS executives around the financial crisis.

In fact, our own perusal of UBS’s remuneration reports suggests Fitzgibbon and Sharkey are more likely to have given up on cashing bonuses from the crisis era. Options issued to senior UBS bankers in 2007 expired on 28th of February 2017, worth absolutely nothing at all. While senior Goldman Sachs bankers were able to cash in crisis-era options days before they were due to expire thanks to a Trump-induced increased in Goldman’s share price, UBS’s 2007 options have died underwater. They were due to vest at between CHF67 and CHF73. UBS’s current share price is CHF16.2, So much for that then.

Separately, Morgan Stanley may not pay super-well, but it has some pretty fine cuisine. Zach Friedman, one of the bank’s former executive chefs has been recalling his days catering to 30-50 senior Morgan Stanley bankers with fondness. “We changed our menu every day. It was like a secret kitchen where “the stainless steel shines like no other stainless steel shines,” says Friedman. The bankers in question were fed, ‘Iberico pork, foie gras, truffles, and whole animals.’ This was the early 2000s: it’s possible that Morgan Stanley MDs only eat parts of animals now.

Meanwhile:

I don’t recall ever seeing foie gras and truffles on the menu at the Goldman Sachs cafeteria, but maybe I just wasn’t executive enough. (Bloomberg)

The shift to quantitative investing is playing out at Man Group: its discretionary fund has been hit by redemptions while quant fund assets rose 20%. (Financial Times)

How about a year’s secondment to Bridgewater now Ray Dalio’s semi-gone? There’s a new “Bridgewater Senior Fellowship Program,” which will bring highly distinguished individuals into Bridgewater for a year to explore what our culture is like and lend their expertise and insights to our organization.” (Business Insider)

Maybe you can get a job on the buyside? Buyside fixed income trading desks have had their budgets increased 3%! (The Trade News)

Pugnacious British fund manager moves to Mauritius: “It is much more convenient in terms of its time zone than London for dealing in Asian markets, and I find being away from the ‘noise’ of London helpful.” (The Times)

It’s possible banks won’t move jobs out of London after all. Take Morgan Stanley, which was going to move 1,000 bankers and is now only moving 300. (Bloomberg)

When UBS sought cryptographers to test blockchain technology, it posted encrypted tweets about the job. “If you could decrypt them, you knew where to go.” Forty to 50 applicants showed up. (WSJ)

Blackrock cut bonuses for the first time since 2011. They’re down 2-4%. (Bloomberg)

A taxi driver will overcharge you if he finds out you’re on expenses. (Economist)

Self-employed ex-Wall Street analyst still gets up at 5am, pulls on jeans and a jumper, whizzes up a smoothie and opens his laptop. (Financial Times)

Get the Steve Bannon shirt look. (Esquire)

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Photo credit: UBS by thetaxhaven is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Just because you have a first class economics degree from Harvard doesn’t mean that you’re ready to work for a hedge fund now. Graduates are usually missing one key ingredient – data science.

Point72 Asset Management – which hires less than 1% of the students who apply to its academy – now puts all of its analyst recruits through the sort of technical training it believes is key to gaining an edge in the future.

“Every analyst we hire is now required to undertake some basic data science and programming training,” said Matthew Granade, managing director and chief intelligence officer at Point72. “Most economics graduates coming out of Wharton and the like do not have much focus on statistics or programming. These are the foundations of the skills we require.”

Point72, like many discretionary hedge funds, is at an inflection point. Currently, around two-thirds of its investments are the traditional discretionary style, and the rest is quant investing. Much of this is down to Steve Cohen’s belief that highly-skilled people should be picking individual stocks using a bottom up approach. But this is shifting.

“When you think of the finance careers of the future, it’s going to be much more like the Social Network and less like Wolf of Wall Street,” said Granade speaking at the Newsweek Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Capital Markets conference yesterday.

But this doesn’t mean that Point72 is going out to hire PhDs or computer science graduates. It still wants investment expertise, but expects its portfolio managers to have the skills to work with huge datasets.

The future will be less about “ sleepless analysts reading the tea leaves”, he said, making investment decisions based on sell-side research and accounting data. Point72 is instead now using the huge quantities of data coming out of third-parties, such as credit card receipts or consumer geo-location data. Every day, two or three new sources of data are added to its investment process, said Granade.

Therefore, Point72 is trying to figure out the “limits of the human brain” and how best to use people and computers for its investments.

“We’re relying heavily on alternative data sources and quantitative techniques, but it can’t be fully-automated,” he said. “Right now, these data sets are too fragile to just put through an algorithm. Human judgement is important – the logic and decision making for investments has to be laid out clearly. But we can leave portfolio construction and trade execution to the computers.”

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Suffice to say, Deutsche Bank’s hiring freeze means that not a lot of people are coming through the door, and ongoing cuts in its markets business have been disproportionately hard on its UK operations. However, Deutsche Bank has just convinced a Goldman Sachs lifer in Hong Kong to move to London for a key M&A role.

Christos Tomaras, most recently chief operating officer of Asia ex-Japan M&A for Goldman Sachs, is now head of EMEA financial sponsor M&A at Deutsche Bank in the UK.

Tomaras relocated from London to Hong Kong in 2014 when M&A deals were booming in Asia. At the same time, Goldman Sachs named John Kim as its new head of Asia M&A as it replaced Richard Campbell-Breeden. Goldman Sachs retained the number one spot for M&A deals in Asia with $176m in revenues, or 7.7% of the market, in 2016 according to Dealogic data. However, it’s been a tough year for M&A in Asia. Deal volume in China, which accounts for around half the activity in the region, fell by 28% in 2016 – second only to the UK, which tumbled by 48%.

For Tomaras, the new role at Deutsche Bank looks like a return to his roots. Before moving to Hong Kong, he was a managing director and head of European sponsors M&A for Goldman Sachs in London. Tomaras has worked at Goldman Sachs for the entirety of his investment banking career. He joined as an analyst in 1998 after graduating from Cambridge University with a Masters in Engineering.

Alasdair Warren, the former Goldman Sachs banker who joined Deutsche Bank to head up its EMEA M&A team in November 2015, may have had some sway over Tomaras’ decision to join the German bank. Since Warren has been at the helm, a number of former Goldman Sachs investment bankers moved across. Charlie Cetin, a former senior managing director at Goldman, joined as co-head of corporate and investment banking coverage strategy and client accountability for EMEA in August. Lower down the ranks, David Ibáñez, a TMT investment banker at Goldman, joined Deutsche as an executive director in December.

Warren has a task on his hands reviving Deutsche’s flagging investment bank in Europe. Deutsche finished in 9th place in the 2016 European M&A deal volume league tables, down from 6th in 2015 (and 1st in 2012).

Warren said in November that Deutsche had been “distracted by a bunch of internal related issues” throughout late 2015 and the early part of last year, and that it had to fight to regain market share from its U.S. competitors. Despite the hiring freeze across the organisation, Deutsche has also previously said that it would selectively hire M&A bankers to increase its sector coverage.

Nonetheless, Deutsche’s investment banking business has undergone some changes. Most significantly, Jeff Urwin, the co-head of its investment bank, is reportedly in talks to leave. But it also promoted a number of senior investment bankers in October, in an effort to both boost its investment banking revenues and stop an exodus of talent following a period of poor performance and cuts to the bonus pool. Deutsche Bank has said that most of its employees will receive no bonus this year.

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Back in the early days of the millennium, shortly after the internet bubble burst and before 9/11, I took a job at a French investment bank. I worked the night shift as a project assistant for Lazard Frères at their New York City location in Rockefeller Center, where I supported banking and asset management teams focused on M&A in emerging markets across Asia and Latin America.

Working the swing shift had its benefits. I was compensated for meals and provided with black-car service home to the outer boroughs. And unlike the full-time executive assistants during the day, I was able to dress business casual, a small win for a creative type who at times felt like a fish out of water among the cherry-paneled conference rooms and Bloomberg terminals.

As well as answering the phones for three senior managing directors, my responsibilities included scheduling and coordinating strategy sessions, aggregating market research materials for pitch books, assembling presentations, as well as other administrative tasks like calendaring, reception and ordering food for onsite meetings.

Prior to Lazard, I had only ever worked as a digital media marketer for a major television network. So switching into the financial services sector, even on a temporary basis, was a huge leap for me. Those two years I worked at Lazard proved to be an eye-opening experience, which provided my first real exposure that helped me to understand the effects of globalization in business.

It also provided an opportunity to observe the behaviors of ambitious, successful professionals and how they managed the day-to-day stress of demanding stakeholders. These life lessons have served me well.

Be brave, self-confident and tenacious

Gandhi once said that “The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.” These are all worthy characteristics to begin to cultivate during your work life. As you journey through your career, you’ll soon acquire other sets of skills and log accomplishments, some of which you didn’t even know you were capable of achieving.

Persistence, adaptability to change, determination, collaborative teamwork, innovative thinking and maybe even coding. These qualities aren’t just buzzwords for your resume; they define who you are as a professional and pave your way to becoming the next best thing. Own them with pride.

Work hard and play hard – but know your limitations

Long hours. Stressful work environments. Those realities are no longer limited to banking – just browse online feedback posted by tech companies’ employees to see for yourself. If you are committed to your job and have a strong work ethic, “living at work” may be a part of your career for a while.

In the short term, this is okay as long as you keep yourself in check. There’s a huge difference between challenging yourself to accomplish the impossible and running yourself into the ground. Your health should always be your number-one priority. Know what your limitations are, then adjust as needed.

Keep an eye on the prize – everything else will follow

There are two success metrics at play, the one the company sets for you and the one you set for yourself.

Working in a high-income career affords you the opportunity to live a better life, whether that means paying off school loans, scoring a sweet apartment in Williamsburg or the Lower East Side or visiting travel destinations on your bucket list.

For some, a tenure at an investment bank extends their knowledge and supplements an MBA with real-life experience to fuel a second career – which in many cases eventually leads to a third career. And for a handful of others who stick it out long-term, it’s simply about the love for the work – the adrenaline rush of closing a deal and acquiring new business – that fuels them.

When you can clearly define what drives you to succeed and bring your best self to your work, success will soon follow, no matter whether you stay in investment banking, jump to the buy side or do something completely different.

Andrea Preziotti is the founder/CEO of Modern Vintage Ink, a Brooklyn-based marketing and content strategy firm. A blog ghostwriter, her clients include senior leaders in retail, fashion and executive coaching. She has worked at Conde Nast and AOL.

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If you’re tossing up which qualification to go for to get a job in an investment bank, maybe an MBA is not the way to go. Instead, you might want to opt for a Masters in Management, which is still feeding a huge proportion of graduates into finance.

23% of London Business School’s MiM graduates this year ended up in investment banking. Within its MBA class of 2016, however, just 7% ended up going into M&A roles.

But, there are a couple of important differentiating factors here – age and cost.

Most LBS MiM students have just one year of work experience and their average age is 23. Meanwhile, LBS’s MBAs were 24-39 and had five years’ work experience.

What’s more, MiM students going into finance earned an average of $63k salary and a $12k bonus. MBAs securing an associate banking job, meanwhile, earned total compensation of $162.3k.

MBAs are often choosing to stay away from investment banking jobs, and investment banks are hiring fewer of them.

But a common complaint from MBAs is that the work of an associate is not interesting enough for their educational background, while investment banking juniors suggest that MBAs don’t have enough technical knowledge to be of use.

Maybe hiring a 23-year-old with a top notch degree under their belt on an analyst’s salary is the way to go.

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While financial services firms cut front office and support jobs, compliance remains a stalwart of expansion. With scrutiny from regulators – not to mention legal and reputational risk – at an all-time high, banks, asset managers, broker-dealers and other financial institutions are expanding their compliance teams.

Goldman Sachs, for one, added nearly 3,000 people to its net headcount in 2015, an 8% increase on 2014, as part of the firm’s “significant investment in regulatory compliance,” according to Goldman CFO Harvey Schwartz.

“This is a great time to be in compliance, no matter what part of the spectrum [of financial services] you’re in,” said Amy Lynch, the president of FrontLine Compliance, a strategic consultancy. “Regulation and compliance are suddenly everyday terms, not four letter words.”

Getting your foot in the door

The demand for air-tight compliance is so high that it can be hard for hiring managers to find the people they are looking for with the right skill set.

That’s great news for experienced compliance officers, but how do you break into compliance in the first place?

Compliance is unlike accounting in the sense that there isn’t a straightforward career path that most people follow successfully.

“If you want to be an accountant or auditor, you major in accounting, you go to a career day at your college, and you meet with recruiters from the Big 4,” said Jack Kelly, managing director of the Compliance Search Group. “Compliance has been around for so long but its importance has increased dramatically of late.

“It’s not a direct line like other careers – it’s often haphazard in terms of how people get into it,” he said. “People work as a stock broker or an operations specialist then move into a compliance role.”

Getting a compliance qualification doesn’t necessarily mean you get into compliance. There are a lot out there including Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP), the National Society of Compliance Professionals (NSCP) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Institute at Wharton’s Certified Regulatory and Compliance Professional (CRCP) designation. However, figures from our resume database suggest that a lot of compliance professionals in the U.S. still opt to pursue a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program instead of a specialist qualification.

Get a good undergraduate degree, skip the law degree

A lot of people think automatically about a legal background, but a J.D. is really not necessary for a compliance role at a bank or other financial services firm.

Even at the entry level, compliance specialists don’t just memorize regulations, policies and procedures and go over documentation – compliance roles are far more quantitative and complex than they used to be.

“I don’t believe we’ve produced enough qualified human beings to fill all of the compliance opportunities at banks going forward,” said Carol Hartman, executive vice president of recruitment firm DHR International. “It’s a big growth area, so raising your hand and saying you’re interested in a compliance role would be enough to attract the attention of recruiters.”

In terms of qualifications, rather than a law degree, Hartman believes that a Bachelor’s in mathematics, economics or decision sciences, taking a few accounting courses along the way, would be helpful for aspiring compliance professionals.

“For compliance at a bank, an undergraduate degree is plenty for an entry level job,” she said. “A lot of people have gotten into compliance from back-office support roles, which is a great way to get into that sort of work, doing operations, controls or back-office support at a broker-dealer or bank.’

Lynch agrees that an accounting or law degree is not necessary, certainly not for entry-level compliance positions. She recommends a Bachelor’s degree in general business management.

Our stats support the fact that the majority of compliance professionals either have only a Bachelor’s degree (25.2%) or a Bachelor’s and a law degree (27%). Less than 10% have a Master’s, while MBA was not as prominent, with just 6.5% of compliance professionals possessing one. Slightly more than 1% possess a Ph.D.

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Matthew, 29, is a Hong Kong-based banker from Australia. He works in a VP role at a large investment bank and admits that Hong Kong has its hedonistic side.

“There is a drinking culture here; it can’t be helped really,” says Matthew, who asked not to be named.

To Matthew, Hong Kong is living up to its reputation as a place where bankers work hard but also play hard.

“I think the banking sector is still influenced by British culture, and grabbing a beer down at the pub isn’t an unusual occurrence. But your local pub just tends to be a bit ritzier than what you might find back home,” he adds.

For the most part, the famous Lan Kwai Fong district is still the perennial favourite area for bankers to unwind after work. Its proximity to Central (where bankers work) and Mid-Levels (where many of them live) makes it an accessible destination.

In recent years, however, the banking party crowd has been moving west of Central.

The area west of Hollywood Road – including Sheung Wan, the recently gentrified district of Sai Ying Pun, and even as far as Kennedy Town – has become a popular place to grab a decent drink and meal with all the hipster comforts of New York or London, according to bankers we spoke with.

But relaxing if you’re a Hong Kong banker isn’t all about eating and drinking.

Bankers, especially expatriate ones, are increasingly getting involved in Hong Kong’s booming hiking scene in order to explore the territory’s many hills and beaches.

“It’s one of those things you don’t expect when you come to Hong Kong. It starts out as a novelty, but now I go out on the trails at least a few times a month,” says Angus, who’s worked at Citi in Hong Kong for five years.

“Hiking and Hong Kong are becoming synonymous to the expat experience,” he adds.

More competitive bankers are starting to get into trail running. Michel Lowy, co-founder of boutique investment bank SC Lowy, and three colleagues recently finish second in the corporate category of the Barclays Moontrekker Moonlit 30km trail race on Lantau Island.

Meanwhile, exclusive health clubs are springing up for those who prefer to do their exercise in Central.

“There’s no shortage of high-end yoga studios, gyms and boxing studios. And there’s always a handful of 20-something expat bankers sweating it out next to you there – sometimes a roomful,” says investment banker Matthew, as he downs his third local craft beer of the night.

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You’ve been searching in Singapore or Hong Kong for a new banking job and you’ve finally found what you think is a perfect fit. You face one big problem, however: your CV is what recruiters like to call ‘too choppy’, because you’ve changed banks too often in the recent past.

While you can never completely cover up your job hopping, you can tweak your resume to make it more palatable to recruiters and banks. Here’s how:

Highlight your rank at the bank

Unusually in a hierarchical industry like banking, too many candidates highlight their job descriptions on their CVs at the expense of their official rank. “Make your ranks – associate, AVP etc – obvious on your CV, so the person looking at it can immediately see if you moved companies for a step up,” says Natasha Madhavan, a principal consultant at recruitment agency Selby Jennings in Singapore.

Relate your reasons

“People will naturally make their own assumptions as to why candidates leave roles, so it’s important to write an explanation at the end of each job. This need not be long, just a one-liner,” says Madhavan.

Make it clear if it’s a contract

If your short stint at a bank was in fact a contract role, make this abundantly clear. Contract positions are getting more popular in Asia, but don’t expect recruiters in the region to automatically realise the terms of your employment, says Madhavan.

Love your layoffs

Unless you were laid off for underperformance, you are strongly advised to mention redundancies on your resume. “Hiring managers are more understanding about frequent job changes resulting from company reorganisations. Ensure you indicate on your CV if your move was the result of circumstances beyond your control,” says Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard, managing director of recruiters Robert Half in Singapore.

Point out the positives

“If you haven’t been laid off, always make your career-move reasons positive ones,” says Vince Natteri, director of recruitment firm Pinpoint Asia in Hong Kong. “This could include career development in a specific sector to gain more experience to reach a career goal.”

Accentuate your achievements

It’s bulk-standard advice, but if you’re a job hopper it matters more than ever: focus your resume on your achievements. For those with a particularly choppy history, you could remove some of your mundane job duties to ensure the reader sees only achievements. “Hiring managers do pay attention to candidates who made a positive difference, even if they had a short tenure,” says Imbert-Bouchard.

Pool them all

“Another option is to pool together several related experiences on your CV,” says Imbert-Bouchard. “You could use a particular skill as a heading and under it describe your specific achievements in the different banks you’ve worked for.”

Add an ‘early career’

If most of your job hopping took place soon after you graduated, you have another alternative: “I recommend consolidating a series of two or three moves under the heading ‘early career’ and writing a sentence or two about each company and role undertaken,” says Paul Lyons, Hong Kong managing director of recruitment firm Ambition.

Don’t dodge dates

Providing a year and leaving out the month that the job started and ended is a common enough tactic to partly disguise a short tenure. But missing months always raise alarm bells in recruiters’ minds – you’re actually better off being precise about dates.

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““

Both Steve Jobs and Ray Dalio were known for being harsh, demanding bosses. But while Jon Rubinstein was able to stick with Jobs for 16 years, he lasted just 10 months under the management of Dalio.

On Wednesday, Dalio announced that Rubinstein had abruptly left Bridgewater Associates after just 10 months, replacing him with an executive who almost left the hedge fund earlier this year. “We mutually agree that he is not a cultural fit for Bridgewater,” Dalio said of Rubinstein, who will work as an adviser to the firm.

While something like that might seem shocking at another firm, it is commonplace at Bridgewater.

Many attribute such short-lived tenures of high-profile additions and entry-level employees alike to Dalio’s demand for “radical transparency” in the workplace. Employees rate each other on their performance via iPad apps and each one has a “baseball card” with their ratings for various characteristics. Bridgewater is developing algorithms based on such employee data to automate decision-making such as who gets a promotion and how much each person’s raise will be, according to Bloomberg.

That type of quirky culture takes some getting used to for anyone, and some people are never able to come to terms with it.

Rubenstein was brought in to redesign Bridgewater’s technology, but ended up getting frustrated because he got caught up with the little things rather than being able to look at the big problems. Like most large financial services organisations, Bridgewater’s tech is straining under outdated legacy systems, but this wasn’t being replaced at the rate it needed to be. Bridgewater’s radical transparency, it seems, doesn’t work for a technology professional used to Agile working methodologies and innovative tech projects.

Separately, shares of the social-network-that-calls-itself-a-camera-company Snap popped more than 40% on their trading debut yesterday, which could boost IPOs generally and encourage other big private technology companies to go public in the near future, according to the New York Times.

At its first-day closing price of $24.48 a share, Snap makes its much bigger rival Facebook – as well as Google, Amazon and even Netflix – look like super-affordable “value” stocks. And many people are looking at Twitter as an analogous case that could serve as a cautionary tale. Snap posted a net loss of $514.6m and earned $404.4m in revenue last year. In 2015, its revenue was $58.6m.

A typical IPO has a lot of wild action going on behind the scenes, and Snap was no exception.

A Lightspeed Venture Partners executive who found out about Snap from his early-adopter teenage daughter convinced her high school to invest $15k in the seed-funding round, which is now worth tens of millions of dollars. Lightspeed turned an $8m investment – when Snapchat had just 100k users – into $2.2bn.

Once a modest researcher on Wall Street, Imran Khan “clawed his way up” the ladder at J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse – helping to lead Alibaba’s IPO while working at the latter – before joining Snap as “the adult in the room.” Goldman and Morgan Stanley investment bankers had to court his favor to become Snap’s lead underwriters.

Meanwhile:

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan wants to change the Volcker rule (Handelsblatt)

Many of the 30 richest people on Earth currently – or used to – work in financial services. (Business Insider)

Goldman’s cost-cutting efforts have ruffled feathers by going after bankers’ beloved BlackBerries. (Bloomberg)

The head of the world’s biggest asset manager and the world’s most successful investor have a major disagreement. (WSJ)

PwC pushed two partners out of the picture, but did not fire them, after their Oscars envelope screw-up. (FT)

The blundering duo has been given bodyguards after receiving death threats. (BBC)

AI is red hot in financial services and beyond, but scientists admit that it could lead to various doomsday scenarios. (Bloomberg)

Email and the humble telephone are passé, and even Slack may be going out of style as the always-on video conference, also known as a wormhole or portal, is set to become the next big thing in offices. (Bloomberg)

Many women still balk at the risk of investing in MBAs. (FT)

There’s a strong case for taking microdoses of cannabis at work. (Bloomberg)

Some employees actually prefer bosses who are micromanagers. (BBC)
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““

Tim Jennison has left Morgan Stanley after 17 years. He’s not going to a rival bank. He’s not retiring to his native America. He’s going to become a strategy consultant- in Frankfurt.

It’s all a bit of a change for a man who joined Morgan Stanley seven years after leaving university in 1991 and has stayed there ever since. In his last role, Jennison was head of EMEA credit sales and head of EMEA bank solutions. He survived Morgan Stanley’s paring back of its fixed income sales and trading business in late 2015 and he participated in last year’s 220% increase in fixed income sales and trading revenues. Now, he’s decided upon a change.

It’s not clear why Jennison chose Frankfurt for his new role. It’s notable, however, that U.S. banks like Goldman Sachs seem to favour Frankfurt as the post-Brexit location for their trading activities. Maybe Jennison is hoping to make money advising them on the move? He likely has some experience of working with German clients after starting his Morgan Stanley career as a Pfandbrief trader.

Jennison is the second big exit from a U.S. bank in London to come to light this week. Guy Saidenberg, the London-based global head of Goldman Sachs sales strats and structuring, has also left – for retirement. More exits are likely in the coming month now that bonuses have been paid. Sales staff are more likely to go than traders – on the whole, headhunters say they’ve been less well rewarded across the market this year.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

Photo credit: Morgan Stanley Headquarters by Alex Proimos is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Stephane Alizond spent nearly twenty years working in the City of London before returning to his native Paris, where he’s in the process of opening an art gallery. He didn’t leave London because of Brexit – he went before that – but he says Brexit is suddenly inspiring plenty of his French finance friends in the City to follow his example.

“A lot of people are coming back home since Brexit,” he tells us. “Usually for a complete career change. There are a lot of very bright, competitive bankers dedicating themselves to something new – I know people who have opened restaurants or become farmers.”

The City is reliant on a huge population of French expats who work in investment banking, derivatives structuring and other complex financial services roles that tap the ready supply of talent coming out of the grande écoles. There are an estimated 300,000 French expats living in the UK and around a third work in the City. Not only are French bankers fearful of their jobs relocating elsewhere in London, they’re also scared on the impact Brexit will have on the number of French nannies, school teachers and other support networks that speak French to their children.

Alizond two decade City career was predominantly spent in derivatives sales positions, at banks including UBS and BNP Paribas. For the last nine years of his banking career he was at Royal Bank of Scotland, latterly as head of the core Europe risk solution group. He tells us that he was “fed up of banking” and wanted to do something different – an increasingly common move among French bankers in London, he says. Now, he’s setting up an art gallery in the fifth district of Paris on Rue Claude Bernard.

It’s difficult for today’s banks’ sales professionals to envisage the glory days of pre-crisis big bonuses, but Alizond didn’t spend his annual payouts on Ferraris or London property. Instead, he channeled the money into his passion for contemporary Japanese photography.

“My bonuses essentially allowed me to build up a big art collection over a number of years,” he said. “This was more about enthusiasm than any commercial venture, but I’d known since 2008 than I needed to leave banking. The derivative markets were essentially dead – no one had an appetite for buying complex products anymore.”

Alizond’s gallery, which opens in May, will focus on his photographic interests. He says contemporary Japanese photography is still an untapped niche in art gallery-heavy Paris. For the past year, he’s been visiting Japan to connect with artists like Daido Moriyama, Araki Nobuyoshi and Tomoko Sawada and bring their work to France.

Despite Alizond’s enthusiasm for photography as an art form, the new gallery is very much a commercial venture. The intention is not simply to exhibit the work, but also to sell it.

Wall Street professionals can spend huge sums of money on building collections and a lot of this can be modern art. Take Robert Tibbles, a Santander bond salesman who has a large collection of Damian Hurst pieces, as well as around 30 works from artists such as Gilbert and George, Simon Patterson, Ian Davenport, Michael Landy and Michael Craig Martin. Meanwhile, Paul Leong, a Wall Street investment banker, has a vast collection of modern art in his New York penthouse. Alizond is planning to take advantage this.

“There are a lot of people in banking who are keen art collectors, and I have friends in finance who are interested in buying some work,” he says. “I’m a salesman at heart, and I know a lot of finance professionals and former clients who would be interested in buying the photos. It’s a hobby and passion that has become a business.”

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image courtesy of Stephane Alizond

““

For all Barclays’ efforts to gain market share in U.S. investment banking, senior people continue to leave for competitors.

The latest departure is David Lauffer, a healthcare investment banker in New York. He left Barclays earlier this year and is now a managing director in healthcare investment banking at RBC Capital Markets. Lauffer worked at Barclays for nearly seven years, having joined from pharmaceuticals firm Novartis in 2010. Before that, he worked as a VP in healthcare investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York.

Barclays’ healthcare team has been changing since it poached Deutsche Bank’s top bankers in the sector – Jason Haas and David Levin – in March last year. Shortly after in May, it hired Evan Matlin as a director in healthcare banking from Deutsche Bank.

RBC Capital Markets, meanwhile, has been hiring for healthcare. It brought in Vincent Lozada as a managing director from Credit Suisse in June, while healthcare banker Marcus Ricciani joined as an MD from Barclays in the same month.

Barclays continues to lose senior investment bankers on Wall Street to competitors. Paul Cugno and Robert Anderson, managing directors in leveraged finance, left for Jefferies in January, while Shiv Rao, a managing director in its investment bank in New York, joined Wells Fargo late last year. Brennan Spry, managing director in New York, joined J.P. Morgan’s investment bank in Atlanta earlier this month.

Recent Barclays departures are not restricted to its investment banking division, however. Ashish Saksena, a managing director in interest rates derivatives trading who had worked at the bank for more than 12 years, has just joined hedge fund BlueCrest Capital Management in Singapore.

And, as we reported this week, Johnny Wu, a managing director in its U.S. equities trading team is retiring in search of “new challenges that lie ahead”.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

““

As quant funds outperform discretionary investors on the buy-side, human researchers on the sell-side should surely be worried. – After all, who needs their carefully considered advice when an algorithm can make better sense of the market in a moment? One senior J.P. Morgan analyst working out of San Francisco says he’s not that concerned, yet.

“Whenever the question is changing, the machines fall apart,” said Rod Hall, a senior J.P. Morgan analyst covering telco and networking equipment and IT hardware. “What machines won’t be good at, is figuring out what the next big questions to ask are,” added Hall. “For example, it’s difficult for an algorithm to ask the right questions about the replacement for the iPhone at Apple… This is where humans come into the equation.”

Hall was speaking at this week’s Newsweek conference on artificial intelligence (AI) and data science in London. Also present was Sylvain Champonnois, a member of Blackrock’s long established scientific active equities team which has been in the systematic space since 1985. Blackrock made a push into AI in 2015 when it hired Bill MacCartney, a natural language processing expert from Google.

Champonnois agreed that today’s algorithms fail when the paradigm shifts. The changing political situation is a case in point. “You have events like Trump and Brexit and the French election and your algo is based on data from the past,” said Champonnois, adding that contemporary algorithms failed to function well during the Eurozone crisis and that most struggle to deal with the abnormalities of data from Japan.

Machine learning is more than just a simple algorithm though. In theory it’s a self-reinforcing system which – in the case of investments – learns from past mistakes to make better investing decisions in future, as at AI hedge fund Sentient Technologies. So, will AI fully displace human stock pickers as the time horizon of the data sets it’s based on increases? – After all, now that Trump’s happened once, the algos will know how to model market reactions to a Trump-like event in future. Yves-Laurent Kom Samo, a Google Scholar and former FX quant trader at J.P. Morgan and equities algo trading strat at Goldman Sachs, said it will and that time horizons aren’t really the issue. “The more data we have, the better we will be. When you have the data, I see no reason why machines won’t be able to come up with new trading ideas,” Kamo claimed.

For the moment, however, human stock pickers like Hall have their place. For all their attempts to develop artificially intelligent trading systems which superannuate humans, most funds have had limited success. Sentient, for example, only runs its own money and has been slow to release meaningful results. MacCartney only stuck around at Blackrock for 14 months before leaving and joining Apple. “There’s a model where you hire a PhD and put him into a room thinking he’s going to do amazing things, but the reality is that the algorithm he’s developed may only tell you things you already know,” said Champonnois.

In January, J.P. Morgan hired Geoffrey Zweig, a natural language processing expert from Microsoft, to form a new global machine learning division. Zweig is undoubtedly in a room with some PhDs and big things are possible. From Hall’s perspective, however, J.P. Morgan’s machine learning aspirations sound pretty modest. “We’ve been working out how to use AI to reduce our lower value workflows, like reading through 10Q reports” said Hall. J.P. Morgan wants computers to read companies’ 10Q reports and identify the most salient points for humans to process later, he added. “AI is a co-pilot to allow us to think faster and process more information,” said Hall. – It’s not a replacement for human beings, yet.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

If you’re going to leave an investment bank, this is the time of year to do it. Bonuses have been paid and hiring budgets have been renewed. Stock at most banks is also at a 12 month high, so if you get bought out you’ll be bought out at a good level.

The latest Wall Street escapee is Brian Fahrman, a former municipal bond trader at Credit Suisse in New York City. After 18 years in banking (10 at Credit Suisse, four at DB and nearly three at ML), Fahrman is off to become an assistant portfolio manager at McDonnell Investment Management, a Chicago-based fixed income adviser with around $11.5bn under management.

Fahrman’s exit follows Credit Suisse’s promise to cut costs in the investment bank by another 15%. Revenues in the Swiss bank’s fixed income sales and trading unit fell nearly 18% last year, while J.P. Morgan and Citi achieved increases of 21% and 15% respectively.

McDonnell Investment Management is owned by Natixis Global Asset Management, which acquired it in 2012. The fund appointed new management in 2015 and is now run by former chief investment officer Mark Giura.

Fahrman isn’t the only Credit Suisse employee in NYC heading to the buy-side. Dave Cielusniak, an attorney and former COO at the Swiss bank quit for equity investor Times Square Management in February.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

Charlie Park (a pseudonym) started university in 2008, the year the financial crisis struck. Bear Stearns had already collapsed and been assimilated by J.P. Morgan and Lehman was about to go the same way and be cherry-picked by Barclays. The financial world was falling apart, but Park didn’t care: he was studying mathematical economics, and when he graduated he wanted to work in finance. There was no other option.

“I went to a school of mathematical economics so I could go into finance,” says Park. “Everyone in my immediate family had done finance. My mom worked in finance, my dad worked in finance. It was something I grew up with and what I wanted to do.”

Park was lucky. He secured a job before his course finished. Even better, the job he got was with a hedge fund – and hedge funds are notoriously frugal about hiring juniors. Before it even began, however, Park’s fledgling finance career was derailed. “A week before I graduated, I got a letter from the hedge fund telling me they needed to delay the job for a year,” says Park. “What was I supposed to do – I’d missed the hiring round anywhere else.”

With 12 months to burn, Park halfheartedly looked for short term entry-level contracts in finance. “When you’re looking for a finance job you need put 1,000% of your effort into the application process,” he says. “I didn’t do that – I knew I still had my offer to join the hedge fund after a year, so I took it easy.” Even so, he eventually got a short term contract with a private equity fund, and then left for the fund that had put him on hold.

If you join an investment bank as an analyst, you’ll benefit from an extravagant training program. At the hedge fund Park joined, this wasn’t the case. “There wasn’t much of a nurturing atmosphere,” he says. “I had to teach myself everything – the only way I learned how to build a financial model, for example, was by dissecting the models they already had and seeing how they worked. It was like I was thrown into the fire-pit and they wanted to see if I burned.”

He lasted just over 24 months, at which point the fund made a round of layoffs are losing 30% of its assets under management. “It was first in first out,” says Park. “- Irrespective of how well you’d been performing.”

Aged 25, Park was therefore given his first experience of finding a new finance job when you’re on the street. It was even harder than finding a first finance job from college. “It’s very difficult to jump back into a fund when you’re out of the market,” he says. “Everyone assumes your exit was performance-related and no one will touch you. The only way to move between hedge funds is to jump from job to job when you’re still employed.”

Even so, Park did manage to get back in again. This time, he was given a six month internship with another hedge fund. “It was kind of an extended interview,” he says. “They wanted to see how I did over six months and decide whether to hire me.” At the end of the six months, he was out again – even though he’d recommended some of that year’s best performing stocks.

Nowadays, Park is done with finance. He’s spent the past eight months as a business analyst in the tech sector and says he’s never going back. “You look at these finance jobs and the financial incentive is very high,” he says, “But there are also huge downsides. – They promise that the workload gets easier over time, whereas in reality you just get used to the long hours. It’s nepotistic and political. – I tried to incorporate regression and analysis and other more complicated data analyses techniques into my financial models, and was met with harsh resistance.”

In his new role, Park says his contribution is actually appreciated and the culture is far more nurturing: “There’s a “higher tide raises all ships” mentality here, rather than the constant “dog-eat-dog” and face-time mentalities I experienced in the financial world.” He’s now 26 and says he only wishes he gave up on finance sooner: “I’ve seen the light – and I’ve seen how people work in other sectors. There’s no way I’m going back into that deep, dark world.”

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

If you’re looking for a banking job in Singapore or Hong Kong you may well be asking recruitment agencies to help you in your search.

Here’s what to expect from Asian finance recruiters in this year’s post-bonus job market.

1. Know your niche skills

You may not currently think of yourself as a particularly hot candidate, but if you have any niche skills or qualifications, it’s worth chatting to a recruiter to discover your true market worth. Banks’ in-house recruitment teams in Asia are busy dealing with mass-market hiring, so they often rely on agencies for “difficult-to-find” skills, says Han Lee, director at search firm Lico Resources in Singapore.

2. Your recruiter should know the vacancy inside out

The days of recruiters being able to close deals despite scant knowledge of what the job actually entails are (almost) over. Recruiters in Asia stress that they are now “partnering” with banks – they don’t just place adverts and collect CVs but are strategically involved throughout the hiring process. “Our value starts early on – sharing thoughts on the market landscape with clients, telling them where the candidates are, formulating ‘go-to-market’ strategies, deciding on the ‘storyline’ to sell the job, and advising on the timing,” says Lee.

3. Get set for a grilling

It’s the flip side of point two above: banks in Asia expect recruiters to work harder than ever for their fees and this involves them doing increased due diligence on candidates. Expect a tough series of questions when you first meet a recruiter. “Our value comes from knowing the candidate’s background, work achievements and potential fit to the bank’s business,” says Anita Sim, regional head of front office at LMA Recruitment in Singapore.

4. Finding foreign talent

In-house recruitment teams in Asia are more adept at tapping the domestic job market than they are conducting complicated, time-consuming international searches. While banks in Singapore and Hong Kong are making extra efforts to hire local candidates, they are still likely to use recruitment agencies when going global is the best option. “For regulatory roles, for example, if you’re based in the US or Europe your global regulatory knowledge generally starts to develop as you move into a VP or director role, hence this is where banks in Asia will begin to bring in foreign talent,” says Richard Aldridge, a director at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore.

5. More VPs, please

Recruiters are now advertising fewer analyst and associate roles in Singapore and Hong Kong because in-house teams have largely cornered the junior job market. “Most of the time it’s VP and above positions that we are working on – almost all other jobs are done directly by the banks,” says Lee from Lico Resources.

6. Still poaching

Despite the rise of direct recruitment, most banks in Asia remain reluctant to aggressively poach senior rainmakers from competitors. For director or MD roles, where banks might have people in mind from the start, employers typically prefer the anonymity of using a recruiter or headhunter to approach their target candidate, says Lee.

7. Middle-office makes its mark

It’s not only front-office people who are being tapped by recruiters. In a trend that started during the financial crisis and shows no sign of abating, recruiters are increasingly earning their crust by sourcing staff for middle-office roles in Asia. The extent of the talent shortage in risk, compliance and internal audit means banks in the region are struggling to do all their own hiring. “We’ve been seeing more jobs in risk management and product advisory and in the next two years, we are also expecting a continued need in compliance,” says Sim.

8. Chinese banks are using them too

Chinese banks have traditionally shunned recruiters when hiring in their home market, but as they expand their headcounts in Hong Kong and Singapore they are becoming less adverse to using their services. “If an agency can offer a strong local candidate database in HK or Singapore, Chinese banks will be interested,” says Aldridge from Black Swan.

9. Recruiters are now harder to get rid of

If you’ve just accepted an offer for a banking job in Singapore or Hong Kong, don’t think that your relationship with your recruiter is at an end. As part of a push to provide an end-to-end service, recruiters are increasingly being asked to deal with any problems, in particular counter offers, that crop up between offer-acceptance and the candidate’s first day in the new role. “Almost all good candidates are experiencing counter offers in this market, so making sure that they turn up on day-one can be a challenge,” says Lee.

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““

This time last year, Laman Valizada landed a job at one of the world’s top consultancies, a firm renowned for its rigorous recruitment standards: McKinsey & Company.

She is clear about what got her there. “I did the Masters in Finance (MiF) at London Business School and it gave me the right skills to advance my career in a whole new direction.”

Laman says success on the LBS programme – which can be done either full-time (10 to 16 months) or part-time (22 months) – should not be measured purely in terms of the grades you get. “It’s just as important to use the MiF to achieve your career objectives.”

When Laman began the course, she was seeking to broaden and deepen her overall knowledge of finance, and also to understand her true potential and where can it take her.

“I’d been working in oil and gas industry in my home country, Azerbaijan, for seven years. I started as a drilling engineer with Schlumberger, later moved to performance management in BP where my career quickly progressed to a finance leadership role,” she says. “Finance became my real focus and I wanted to take my career to the next level. That’s why I did a finance degree, not a generalist MBA.”

But why choose London Business School? “I had great experience at a multi-national company, but I’d spent all my education and career in one country. To reach my full potential, I felt I needed to study at a truly global institution where I could learn from accomplished and industry leading faculty who are globally recognised in their given field of expertise.”

Still, Laman was “struck by the quality of the people” during the orientation week she spent meeting her new classmates. “At first I kept comparing myself to them and asking myself how I was going to fit in.”

After a “roller-coaster few weeks” studying alongside her fellow students who are some of the brightest minds from all over the world, Laman began to thrive at LBS.

“The Masters in Finance showed me there was so much more I could achieve in my career. When the lecturers talked about career paths for MiF graduates, I initially didn’t even know two-thirds of them,” she says.

This soon changed because Laman’s LBS classes had a “practical career-focused edge” to them, she says. “It’s not a theoretical degree. It lets you know what it’s like to actually work in finance because the people who teach you have worked on big financial deals themselves.”

All MiF students at LBS take three core modules: investments; corporate finance and valuation; and financial accounting and analysis. “In these classes you try out a number of areas of finance in a risk-free environment. This lets you determine where your real passion lies within the industry, so you can choose the elective modules in the next part of the degree that best suit your career objectives.”

Laman’s career “passion” became obvious almost immediately: corporate finance. “I love the way that corporate finance gives you the chance to engage with so many aspects of a company’s growth. That’s why I took an advanced course in it as one of my electives.”

But while Laman knew she wanted to refocus her career towards corporate finance, she was still unclear of the opportunities existing for her. That’s when LBS’s career advisor stepped in and provided her with knowledge and guidance as to what best suited her.

“He pointed out that I was changing roles every two years within the same firm and that soon my current company wouldn’t be able to fulfil my career appetite. He recommended to consider management consulting which suited my profile and would provide the greater variety I needed in a job,” says Laman.

Exploring any opportunity is very easy in LBS – there is a variety of school-led events which lets students connect with literally any industry. After attending few consulting events at LBS, she realized that the advisor was right in the advice he gave. “I could move up the ladder at BP but I’d essentially be doing the same job, only with management responsibilities. Consulting, working with different companies as clients, sounded far more interesting.”

While Laman returned to BP after graduating (and secured a promotion), she already knew that there would be a moment of a career shift in the future. Two years later, Laman began applying to McKinsey. “I knew what I wanted and how to get there. When opportunity came up, I was well prepared for the interviews because of the support I got from LBS consulting network.”

Laman now puts her corporate finance knowledge to use as an associate at McKinsey, where she helps oil and gas clients on M&A, restructuring and other projects.

“My job often involves financial modelling and evaluating companies, two technical skills I didn’t have before I went to LBS. Whenever there’s something at work I’m unsure about, I even look at my old LBS notes for help.”

The Masters in Finance at LBS has also given her the “soft skills” she needs in her new career. “LBS emphasises ‘fast learning’. You might be given a week in a student group to work on a case study and solve a problem that in a company would take months. At LBS you learn to be super-efficient – and that’s also what’s required in consulting.”

Working in small student teams at LBS has boosted Laman’s negotiating and communication abilities, she says. “During the MiF you do group work with a wide range of people. Some of them are difficult, but you learn how to deal with them – that’s a valuable skill. As a consultant you’re always working with new people on short-term projects, so the underlying skills needed are the same.”

Laman says studying at LBS helped her to unlock her true potential. “It is not only about learning advanced and practical skills that would help you to advance your career. It is also about a chance to compare yourself with the best of the best, learn from them, explore the variety of opportunities, understand and shape your own path – and it might end up way more ambitious than you could ever imagine. Without LBS, I wouldn’t be at McKinsey.”

Image credit: jeremyreds, Getty

““

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