One of the most sought after positions in the financial services industry is to be a financial analyst. If you have this job title, then you can work in both junior and senior specialties of a company. The nice thing about this career is that it branches out to many other job opportunities. The finance and account industry is highly competitive. That’s why it is quite a challenge to land a job as a financial analyst. But there’s no need to worry if you want to be a part of this world. After all, there are many preparations that you can do to be successful in this career.
A general overview on the responsibility of a financial analyst is that he or she is assigned to make researches on macroeconomic and microeconomic issues that may affect the business. He or she provides guidance to people who want to make wise investment decisions. For example, recommending a course of action to whether buy or sell a company’s stock based on its overall strength. A financial analyst is up-to-date with new information and developments in the field where he or she specializes in as he or she should be prepared to make financial decisions anytime it is needed. He or she should be proficient and comfortable in working with spreadsheets and statistical programs to be able to accomplish his or her tasks in a timely manner.
If you are currently an undergraduate student who is aspiring to be a financial analyst, then you should take courses in business, economics, accounting and math. Other courses that you should highly consider are computer science, biology, physics and engineering. Almost all of the junior financial analysts that are hired by companies have these backgrounds. Those that have accomplished MBA courses are given the chance to work as a senior analyst right out of business school. This goes to say that your knowledge and skill in these areas will be used as bases for your job employment as well as your pay.
You also have the option to specialize on the type of institution that you will work for. If you get hired by banks, buy and sell investment firms, insurance companies or investment banks, then you can either be buy side analyst or a sell side analyst. The first one is responsible for researching stocks for an in-house fund. A buy-side investment firm is a company that manages its own funds. So your job is to look for stocks that will add to the investment fund. A sell-side firm, on the other hand, is assigned to compare the quality of securities in a given sector or industry. You will use this evaluation to make reports with certain recommendations on buying, selling, strong buy, strong sell or hold. The recommendations that you make are very crucial to a company’s financial and investment standing. These two are just some of the specialties that you can partake into if you are playing in the field of finance and account. Other than these, there are also subspecialties that focus on equities and analyzing fixed-income instruments. It really depends on the type of work that you will have.
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