Breaking the "experience loop"

Water Cooler Careers
#1

I’m currently a level 2 candidate in the CFA program, and I work in FP&A for an asset manager. I cover their alternatives businesses and am hoping to transition into a portfolio management role in this group. I’ve been in FP&A at the firm for 2 years, after spending the first 3 years of my career in the actuarial field (life insurance rotational program).

I’m pursuing the CFA designation as a way to distance myself from the actuarial experience I have and re-brand myself for finance roles. I’ve talked with hiring managers for a few analyst roles on the alts teams, but have been told that they’re looking for someone with more experience in portfolio management or deal execution. I completely understand this. However, how can I go about trying to close this “experience loop”? I can’t get experience in portfolio management without working in this area, and having experience is a prerequisite.

I’m starting to get a little discouraged. It seems like so much of your career is based on what path you immediately took out of college. Since I didn’t pursue banking or management consulting, I feel limited. Obviously an MBA would help my situation, but I’m looking for alternatives to this. I find an MBA to be prohibitively expensive, especially as someone who is still paying off undergrad all on my own.

Has anyone been able to close this gap? What helped and what was a waste of time and energy?

#2

How is FP&A split up by asset class/investment team? Isn’t it just corporate?

Anyway. I broke out of that loop. The advice that helped me was: “start doing the job before you get it.” I wanted to get into ER, so I started covering companies and forecasting quarterly earnings, writing notes, etc… Maybe you could do something similar

#3

there are many managers - mutual fund managers and teams - and even some hedge funds that specialize in specific sectors that really value FP&A guys to join them as equity research…I have posted on AF before but the gist is…say you’re an FP&A for Google…You know each lines on the income, balance, cf statement intimidately and you have an insider knowledge on your company’s budget and future project and valuable knowledge of the industry as a whole. All these are super valuable to managers that focus tech firms or growth firms in the tech industry. BECAUSE, equity research is 70% accounting (looking at the sec filings, proxies, pro forma) that takes really long time to teach someone…the finance part of equity research can be taught in couple weeks.

Your case is the flagrant example of “I got my job through networking or from a connection I know who introduced me to this job…”

#4

A bit off topic but is FP&A more accounting, such as forecasting and budgeting? Or is there another meaning to it?