By Courtney Gordner
You may have racked up hours working odd jobs in college, and you know that those won’t count toward your CFA work experience. But what about the other jobs you’ve held? Would being a teacher, for instance, be a usable work experience? How about the time you spent helping your mom keep financial records for her personal business?
You may have racked up hours working odd jobs in college, and you know that those won’t count toward your CFA work experience. But what about the other jobs you’ve held? Would being a teacher, for instance, be a usable work experience? How about the time you spent helping your mom keep financial records for her personal business?
These are tricky scenarios, because obviously each work experience is different, and there may have been a different amount of actual CFA-related time in even two jobs with similar titles at different companies or industries.
To help clear up those questions, here are five jobs that would qualify as CFA work experience. It's key for half your experience to be making actual investment decisions. Be as descriptive as possible when submitting your information. It’s not acceptable to just write a few words or even just one sentence describing your duties. Go into detail and be extremely thorough.
1. Actuary
An actuary who does projections and is in charge of cash flow analysis fits the work experience bill. Performing durational analysis of individual health insurance policies is also a good qualification, as all these tasks have a direct correlation with investments.
2. Consultant
There are many kinds of consultants. If you’ve ever done management consulting for the financial services industry, that's great work experience, so long as you provide a very detailed account of your duties. Did you work with risk management functions or refine credit models covering a wide number of portfolios? Describe that work on your application.
3. Portfolio Manager
Portfolio management is excellent experience for the CFA exam. Emphasize how you rebalanced your clients' huge portfolios by trading short-term assets and pooling their other funds. Also discuss how you analyzed and evaluated client performance reports.
4. Securities Underwriter
If you work at a company that provides risk analysis and financial planning for customers, chances are you did one of the following, all of which count as what you need toward the exam: Prepared financial models based on data from your client; participated in the decision-making process for assets; and analyzed value acquisition targets that your client had been eyeing.
5. Quantitative Investment Analyst
Think of yourself as a financial engineer. With responsibilities including evaluating productive development and recommending asset allocations, this job gets you heavily involved in the decision-making process for your clients, which is hugely important for your CFA exam. Outline the sort of quantitative methods you used in your decision-making process and give the names of the tools that you employed. Again, you want to be as detailed as possible in these descriptions.
If your current work experience does not fall neatly into one of the set 5, don't despair - you can read our guide to finding out what job experience is needed for the CFA charter. Or you can simply drop us a line at the 300 Hours Forum and we'll sort you out!
To help clear up those questions, here are five jobs that would qualify as CFA work experience. It's key for half your experience to be making actual investment decisions. Be as descriptive as possible when submitting your information. It’s not acceptable to just write a few words or even just one sentence describing your duties. Go into detail and be extremely thorough.
1. Actuary
An actuary who does projections and is in charge of cash flow analysis fits the work experience bill. Performing durational analysis of individual health insurance policies is also a good qualification, as all these tasks have a direct correlation with investments.
2. Consultant
There are many kinds of consultants. If you’ve ever done management consulting for the financial services industry, that's great work experience, so long as you provide a very detailed account of your duties. Did you work with risk management functions or refine credit models covering a wide number of portfolios? Describe that work on your application.
3. Portfolio Manager
Portfolio management is excellent experience for the CFA exam. Emphasize how you rebalanced your clients' huge portfolios by trading short-term assets and pooling their other funds. Also discuss how you analyzed and evaluated client performance reports.
4. Securities Underwriter
If you work at a company that provides risk analysis and financial planning for customers, chances are you did one of the following, all of which count as what you need toward the exam: Prepared financial models based on data from your client; participated in the decision-making process for assets; and analyzed value acquisition targets that your client had been eyeing.
5. Quantitative Investment Analyst
Think of yourself as a financial engineer. With responsibilities including evaluating productive development and recommending asset allocations, this job gets you heavily involved in the decision-making process for your clients, which is hugely important for your CFA exam. Outline the sort of quantitative methods you used in your decision-making process and give the names of the tools that you employed. Again, you want to be as detailed as possible in these descriptions.
If your current work experience does not fall neatly into one of the set 5, don't despair - you can read our guide to finding out what job experience is needed for the CFA charter. Or you can simply drop us a line at the 300 Hours Forum and we'll sort you out!
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