How do I get started with exploring a career in finance?
Are you interested in a career in finance and not sure where to get started? There are so many great resources available to you that I want to make sure you are aware of. For those of you who are just starting to explore the idea of a career in finance, I would encourage you to first utilize Career Beam (resource through HUB) and complete the Quick Profile and the Assessment. The Quick Profile is a brief interactive assessment that will analyze your values, interested and personality. Once completed, your profile will identify careers that may be a good match for you based on your personal preferences. The Assessment piece is additional questions that will help you to put a career plan in place.
After you have completed the assessment work, it is important that you begin to educate yourself on the industry as a whole. Financial Services is quite large and encompasses many different career paths. A great resource that many students have used and recommend are the Vault Career Insider guides. You can access the Vault Industry guides directly through the library website. You can use the vault career guides to help you educate yourself on careers in finance, how to structure a finance resume, interview preparation and more! The Vault Guide resources that I have found to be most helpful to students are the Vault Career Guide to: Investment Banking, Investment Banking, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Private Wealth Management, Sales & Trading. In addition to the Career Guides, I would utilize the Vault Guide to the Top Financial Services Employers, Vault Guide to Finance Interviews and Vault Guide to Advanced & Quantitative Finance Interviews. My point in sharing all of these guides with you is to show you that you have a large amount of career resources available to you! All of these resources will help you plan out your career search strategy.
After you have done your career assessment and conducted research through the Vault Guides, you will have a better understanding as to what particular area of finance you are interested in exploring. A good next step would be to start using LinkedIn. Use the Advanced Search feature of LinkedIn which will give you not only a list of contacts (within a specific industry) but also provide you a list of companies where Babson alumni are currently working. You can click into the profiles and see what career paths people have taken. You might find someone that has been at JP Morgan for 10 years, but the question is what did he/she do right after graduating from Babson? How did that person get to JP Morgan?
As you can see there is a lot of work that goes into exploring and educating yourself on a particular industry. All of this preparation will help you to begin networking with individuals from the business and prepare you for applications & interviews. I would encourage you to engage with CCD to assist you with building your networking skills and help you to make connections. Remember, before you can start connecting with people, you must do your research first!