FP&A - Cost Analysis: Relevant Experience?

Hey folks,

I am working in the Financial Planning & Analysis group at my company which is a large IT service provider - my job involves periodic cost review, forecasting… Capex control and optimizing operating expenses and managing budgets.

Does this count under relevant experience for the CFA charter? Anybody who’s been in a similar job function and gone on to become a charterholder?

Hey,

Did you have a look at the work experience assessment on the CFA website ? Maybe it can help you to frame what is needed to get the charter once you complete the three exams.

http://www.cfainstitute.org/about/membership/process/Pages/work_experience_assessment.aspx

Thanks for this - haven’t seen this earlier

The job title “Corporate finance analyst” seems to be the best fit for me - however I do not see any description on the CFA Institute website against this title. Anybody from this background pls help?

I’m a little nervous about that questionairre. Questions like “Do you research or develop tools, models, strategies, and/or communications that assist portfolio managers and traders with investment decision and risk management?” is pretty much the definition of my job, but we aren’t an investment firm - I do it for an operations perspective (what discount can we offer the customer on our services to recieve target margin? what should our per-job charge for repair and maintenance be to cover our units until retirement? and countless other ad hocs related to profit maximizing, essentially). So if work experience has to be in investments, I’m gonna need to get into finance a lot sooner than I had planned :stuck_out_tongue:

It all revolves around contributing to the investment decision making process. Of course, that can include direct investments (like modelling acquistion targets that your company is considering for example).

Based on your description above, it strikes me that MAYBE you can answer “yes” to the fourth question on the list cfageist linked to (i.e. if you are making capital budgeting decisions, valuing acqisition targets etc.). That said, the traditional FP&A role as I have come to understand it often does not come close enough to be able to say “yes” to that question. If that is the case, they your challenge will be to transition to a role that will provide enough of the “right” experience.

Perhaps there may be internal opportunities that could fufill this?

Good luck!