Most professionals enter investment banking as an undergraduate. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get into the industry, but you must decide very early on that you want to pursue investment banking. Let’s say you didn’t do that.
Here are the other common career transition pathways, ranging from the easiest to the most difficult:
Pathway #1: Lateral Hiring
Lateral hiring refers to the process banks use to recruit candidates with some amount of full-time work experience, often in investment banking elsewhere, but also in related fields such as valuation, corporate banking, and transaction services – rather than recruiting students directly out of undergraduate, Master’s, or MBA programs.
If you’ve got plenty of experience in IB, then switching to a different bank isn’t a big deal. But if you’re moving from a related field, then the closer the field and the earlier you make the move, the easier it will tend to be.
Pathway #2: As A Recent Graduate
The second possibility is that you haven’t fully embarked on your career yet and the concrete is still wet. You have a change of heart and decide to move into investment banking.
While this is very achievable, you’ll need to be very strategic about making the transition and understand that you’ll probably need to be in the top echelons of your profession for your age and career stage.
Pathway #3: At The MBA Level
As you get deeper into your career and build more experience, it becomes more and more difficult to enter investment banking in the usual way, as an Analyst.
If you really want to break in, one way to “reset” your resume is to complete an MBA via a well-regarded program and use that to move into the industry.
Pathway #4: From A Separate Field
The older you get, the more unrelated experience you accrue, and the further you move away from investment banking, the harder it is to get in.
Nevertheless, it’s not impossible. Generally, the high level strategy involves:
- Downplaying how passionate you were about your prior career and explaining why it wasn’t for you.
- Using your prior experience to explain your shift into finance and the transferrable skills you would bring.
- Explaining how committed you are to a career in finance.
It also doesn’t hurt to be based in a non-core region of the world. Doing this in Mongolia or Brazil is likely to be a lot more feasible than attempting this in Manhattan. It’s just a matter of supply and demand.
