Can You Become a Financial Analyst?

are you contemplating the prospect of becoming a financial analyst perhaps you're a student and don't have any work experience at all or you're a seasoned professional who would like to change careers whatever the case if you've ever thought of embarking on the financial analyst career path you have also definitely wondered about the skill requirements for the job - well these can vary significantly depending on the different aspects of the finance field and opportunities for professional specialization however there are some common traits finance analysts share to gain a better understanding of the typical financial analyst profile 365 careers team gathered information from the LinkedIn profiles of 510 financial analysts some of the factors we looked at were education previous work experience country and company of employment of course we paid great attention to professional skills and additional qualifications - to show you a true representation of the professional landscape we screened financial analysts from the USA Europe India and many other parts of the world 293 of them are currently working in fortune 500 listed companies the rest are employed in other large or mid-sized firms finally we grouped employers into five main industry clusters technology IT health care energy industrial and finance so after all this preparation and data collection did the numbers have an interesting story to tell absolutely first let's talk about the general profile of the financial analyst the typical financial analyst is male speaks two languages has eight years of working experience and has been on the job for almost four years in addition they usually have at least one postgraduate professional qualification certificate listed on their LinkedIn profile ok great this is the general picture now let's dig a bit deeper into the details of our study to see its nuances and explore some more interesting additional findings as we mentioned already men represented a larger chunk of the Financial Analysts we sampled accounting for 61% of the individuals in our study however it is also true that the difference of 61 to 39% that's men versus women isn't that overwhelming especially if compared to some other popular fields such as IT data science and engineering finance and the Financial Analysts profession seem to be an accessible feel for women too and it will be interesting to see whether this trend continues to improve in 2021 another factor we examined is foreign language knowledge unsurprisingly most financial analysts speak at least two languages in fact many of the professionals we looked at spoke three four or even five languages of course this can usually be attributed to a multicultural background and is not a necessary requirement for becoming a financial analyst in the majority of cases speaking English as either first or second language would suffice another interesting aspect of the job that we explored was previous work experience our study showed that typically a person needs four years of prior working experience to become a financial analyst this isn't too much though right that said we did look into the most frequent career progression paths and we observe the following the most logical beginnings to a financial analyst career is to start as an intern accountant or an auditor and then advance to the financial analyst title of course we also encountered professionals who graduated to the financial analyst position having held totally unrelated previous positions some had experience working as cashiers or sales assistants and others earned a living by being lifeguards we even had a professional tennis player in our cohort so whatever your profile background if you are determined and willing to learn new skills you can certainly go the extra mile and then aim for a financial analyst career in terms of education most of the professionals in our research held a bachelor's degree in finance or any other related field business or accounting more precisely 68.2% held a bachelor's while 30.2% graduated with a master's degree what's more interesting is that according to our data although studying in a top-ranked university is very beneficial it is not a must when it comes to embarking on a financial analyst career path more than 43% of the financial analysts we analyzed had graduated from non-target schools thus if you are an aspiring financial analyst who is about to graduate or who has graduated from a non-target school you shouldn't worry too much you have significant chances of landing the job okay that's the academic background previous work experience and languages but what are the basic skills you need to possess in order to become a financial analyst well in addition to extensive theoretical knowledge and finance accounting and business as well as soft skills it is important that you have certain technical skills as well undoubtedly you need to be proficient in Excel 71% of the Financial Analysts LinkedIn profiles we reviewed were endorsed for excel or financial modeling and of course one can imagine that there were a few good Excel modelers who did not list their endorsements because they believe this was a very basic skill that said the number of financial analysts who are Excel masters is probably even higher than calculated one way to stand out on the job and at interviews is to be an advanced user who really knows how to work with the spreadsheet software and can take full advantage of its functionalities some 14.3% of financial analysts in our cohort listed s AP as a Nicolle skill they possess to another five percent of Financial Analysts listed Oracle ERP softwares are of crucial importance given the increasing complexity of operations of large multinational corporations and the scale of the transactions they record much less often financial analysts would use programming languages and visualization tools so how do you acquire the technical skills needed for the financial analyst position in the digital age we live in taking an online course is one of the most effective and efficient ways to do that usually online courses come with completion certificates and are often self-paced which makes them a great education and career advancement tool on average thirteen point nine percent of financial analysts reported having taken an online course and we are certain that in the future the number of people who choose to benefit from eLearning will only increase more and more people will see the advantages of taking online courses luckily when it comes to self preparation in the field of Finance there are various types of courses to choose from depending on your goal here's another very interesting and important finding of our study 25% of financial analysts held at least one professional designation certificate the most popular ones are CFA 12.7% CPA 4.9% and ACCA and CI ma with 2.5% each financial analysts who go the extra mile and complete CFA s3 exams are not that many almost one in ten but those who do have a strong competitive advantage going forward in their career all right we mentioned in the beginning that in addition to looking at the financial analyst professional we also looked at who's employing them fortune 500 company or not there are certainly trends when it comes to which industries are hiring the most financial analysts we found that 52 point 5 percent of the financial analyst Nationals in the US are employed in the industrial sector while only 2.9 percent work in the energy field in Europe most financial analysts are employed in the financial health and technology IT sectors while financial analysts in India work primarily in the financial and industrial sectors what we can say is that the profession truly is in demand in every industry sector and organization banks public and private companies NGOs governmental institutions they all need financial analysts the opportunities that this career offers are practically infinite and you can choose freely your specialization field great isn't it ok you are now aware of the professional background and core skills of people currently employed as financial analysts we hope that this will help you get a clearer picture of how to become a financial analyst if you choose to pursue this path and if you are interested in solid finance related preparation starting from scratch make sure you check out the links provided below as we have prepared some amazing content that will help you get the job the complete Financial Analysts course and the cfa level one boot camp thank you so much for enjoying another one of our videos and please subscribe to our channel if you haven't already

Channel: 365 Careers

Views: 344,225

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Id: AI_h5HECOnQ

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020