Now’s the time to find a new job in financial services. According to recruitment firm Astbury Marsden, things are looking up. According to one Morgan Stanley MD this is a great moment to be starting out in M&A. Leverage requirements for European banks are being relaxed. People are calling an end to the great recruitment hiatus of 2008.
What does it take to get a financial services job nowadays though? We’ve examined the many thousands of résumés uploaded into our CV database over the past three months and looked at the sorts of people who say they’re available to work in the City of London or on Wall Street.
The stats below should give you some idea of the calibre of the financial services professionals you’re up against. If you want to work on Wall Street, it clearly helps to study at an Ivy League University. Wherever you are, our figures suggest that the big proficiency of people working in the financial services industry globally is…a mastery of Excel.
Skills and qualifications of financial services job seekers in London now
- 35% claim some proficiency in Excel
- 23% are fluent in French
- 20% have a Masters qualification
- 13% claim to be a leader
- 13% claim some proficiency in the programming language Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
- 12% have some form of CFA qualification
- 9% are fluent in German
- 7% have an MBA
- 7% are fluent in Mandarin
- 6% claim some proficiency in the programming language C++
- 5% claim some proficiency in the programming language Java
- 3% studied at the London School of Economics
- 2% studied at Imperial College London
- 2% studied at U.S. Ivy League Universities (Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Yale)
- 1% went to Oxford or Cambridge University
- 1% have a CFA qualification and an MBA
Skills and qualifications of financial services job seekers on Wall Street now
- 37% claim some proficiency in Excel
- 25% have a Masters
- 16% are fluent in Mandarin
- 16% have some form of CFA qualification
- 15% attended an Ivy League University
- 13% say they’re a leader
- 12% have an MBA
- 11% are fluent in French
- 11% claim some proficiency in VBA
- 9% are fluent in Spanish
- 9% claim some proficiency in the programming language C++
- 6% claim some proficiency in the programming language Java
- 3% have a CFA qualification and an MBA