Do you need to spend thousands studying overseas to get a job at Goldman Sachs in Singapore?
While having an elite foreign degree on your CV certainly won’t harm your chances, almost a third (32%) of the firm’s Singapore-based employees studied locally, according to their public profiles.
We worked out the total number of employees at 10 global banks in Singapore who currently have profiles on LinkedIn. We then calculated the percentage of people at each firm who attended four leading Singapore universities (we didn’t include local polytechnics).
The results in the table below only include people who have public profiles which show their employer and their university. But they provide an indication of the proportion of staff members who went to a domestic institution.
Goldman Sachs has the highest local-degree percentage of the 10 international banks – all its rivals are clustered in the 19% to 24% range – suggesting that it is taking a lead in the government drive to reduce Singapore’s reliance on foreign talent.
This result also stands in marked contrast to our equivalent survey in Hong Kong where Goldman finished bottom of the table, with only 15% of its staff profiles including a local university degree.
Hong Kong is primarily an investment banking hub for Goldman and to get the best front-office talent it typically hires expats as well as local and mainland citizens who’ve attended tier-one schools in the US and Europe. Because Singapore houses a higher proportion of back and middle-office jobs, there’s less need for Goldman to recruit from overseas colleges.
Meanwhile, Singapore universities are increasingly entering the ranks of the global elite. The National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University are listed in 12th and 13th places respectively in the QS World University Rankings.
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