Public Sector, Charity, Non-profit Internships

Hello,

I’m trying to break into finance. Working on getting the lvl I and lvl II designations by next summer. I’d like to get into a treasurer, CFA, financial manager position. Not so much investment Bank stuff as that sounds difficult to break into, but rather a financial manager for specific companies. I see many craiglist job offers for “financial analysts” or “financial managers”. The jobs include variance analysis, project proposal analysis, debt or equity structuring, analysis of other capital investment decisions from machinery to whatever. I’d like to do this.

This relates to the public sector, charities, and non profits in that I think I may be better off finding work or an internship in these areas. The idea being that they’ll give me more responsibility in proposal analysis etc. than I would get starting from some shitty entry level job in a private firm with tons of money for serious financial analysis expenditures… any idea what positions I could target? I’m so lost.

Sounds like you want to be a management accountant.

If you want to gain experience in this area I would look at opportunities in the finance departments in multi-national companies. As I understand it these divisions are all about “variance analysis, project proposal analysis, debt or equity structuring, analysis of other capital investment decisions from machinery to whatever”.

To progress in this area you may have to take a management accounting qualification. Don’t know what the US version is, but I do know there is the CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) which is a well regarded UK qualification and is known in other parts of the world. Stick with te CFA though as it is always a plus and the corporate finance material would be very relevant to what your looking to do.

yeah more money i’ve seen your posts in a few places on this forum and the more you post the more it sounds like you’re more geared towards an accounting/corporate finance type of role…understand while there are some aspects of the CFA that touch on this, it’s not the focus of the program…it also touches on economics, but its not intended for people that are seeking careers as an economist, but more so to have a level of understanding of things that may effect companies…i.e. indicators from the macroeconomy so that as an analyst you can recognize and make smart investment decisions based on what appears to be coming…or from a corp fin standpoint projects a company is considering, will it be profitable and essentially raise the value of the company from the perspective of recommending investment in the company or if you’re a PM actually investing in the company…

CFA is mostly geared towards valuation of companies or managing portfolios…i would hate to see you spend the necessary time to complete this process and not have it help you get to where you want to be as well as something else, like maybe a masters in accountancy and becoming a CPA? most CFOs are CPAs and run the finance/project/accounting divisons first…CIOs would be moreso your CFAs who managed investments prior and then the investments division…its easy to confuse the two

Thanks for the input guys. I still like the idea of portfolio management, it’s just everyone here seems to be a downer about it. I’ll stick with CFA for now, while still considering all of your inputs, and keep plugging away.