Hi Everyone,
I currently work as a financial analyst for a medical company and I want to move into equities. My plan is to leverage the CFA to get my foot in the door and now that I’m a level II CFA candidate, I want to get started on the grunt work to move into equity analyst within the next year or two. I’m hoping you guys can help give me guidance regarding things to research and how to present myself in order to network. I consider all criticism to be helpful so please be as harsh as possible.
Note: I realize there are a lot of threads like this however my quick search didn’t address the questions I’m posing. Sorry for a thread that has been beaten to death.
Programming competency: How valuable is basic programming skills? I’ve played around a little with SAS, Python, and R. Is it worthwhile to become semi-competent in any of them? If so, I was thinking about focusing on python since it has way more material to help me learn it than R and it is significantly cheaper to learn than SAS. Is this a useful skill in-industry/for a hiring manager?
Buy Side vs Sell Side: Everything I’ve read makes it seem like buy-side is superior to sell-side. Should I be focusing on buy-side positions or does it matter since I’m going to be starting off at the bottom?
Networking: What are the best sites to build contacts with analysts/hiring mangers? I was thinking becoming active on this site/linked in are probably my best options. I was also planning on doing a mini-cold calling campaign for hiring managers. My goal would be to talk to them for 10-20 minutes to pick their brains on qualities/skills they look for in an employee and things you can do to stand out. Unfortunately, I assume the target market is very busy and I’m not sure how I can package this in a way that will get a phone call with them. Is there a compelling way to package this request?
When to start applying: Is it worthwhile to start applying now or should I wait until I pass the CFA level 2? Thank you for reading all this, I know I vomited words everywhere.