For busy working professionals who wrote Level 2 exam

CFA Level II
#1

For those who have a demanding job at hand and wrote L2 exam, please indicate how you managed to juggle between work and L2 preparation. How many hours you managed per week? Possibly, there could have been times that there were long gaps in study . What strategies you followed to ensure retention of material . Thanks.

#2

I work full-time, started studying at the end of December (took Dec L1 2016). Ended up studying ~390 hours total including mock exams. Best piece of advice: plan your schedule meticulously before you start studying for every week between when you start and the actual exam to ensure you have a solid schedule that you can hold yourself accountable to. It’s the only way in my opinion to tackle these exams while dealing with a full-time work schedule. Best of luck, don’t hesitate to PM me if I can be of more help.

#3

Thanks Black8Mamba23 for your guidance. Will certainly PM you for more guidance.

#4

Agree with Black8Mamba23, plan your schedule and stick to it. I put my study target on the company calendar and block lunch hours to study (my boss can see the schedule and basically left me alone for the final month). My target is set for an entire week, so if I study a little bit more than needed today, tomorrow is a lighter one as reward. Weekend is a good time to make up all the unmet targets and I don’t allow myself to carry this week’s target to the next one. Make sure you have high quality time, I struggled several times staying awake to study and just didn’t work.

#5

I worked 40-45 hrs/week while preparing. I didn’t count hours or anything. I’d go home from work and usually spend 30-60 mins daily reading the material, and maybe 2-3 hours over the weekend. I started in January. For material retention, I made flashcards of things I figured I should know based on CFAI topic tests and mocks. I also memorized everything on the Schweser quicksheet (and added notes on it, for example using long-term rates for CAPM, and short-term for FFM).

#6

Thanks for valuable comments Tingli and Tactics…Best wishes

#7

I worked like 45-55 hours a week during studying for L2. I started in late January. Not gonna lie it kind sucked, but I agree that its important to have a game plan. I am confident that I did well on the exam, but I also think I put in over the recommended 300 hours.

There were also some days when I “studied” for 4 hours but actually studied for like 1.5. I think its important to realize that youre gonna have some unproductive days like that. If you don’t, you will burn out way sooner than anticipated. Lucky for me, I burned out a week or two before the exam haha

#8

Worked 70+ hrs a week during LII prep. Started laying out my study plan in September and set starting date for beginning of October. 340 hours including Mocks was the target I started with. Distributed those hours only across weekends (initially 5 hrs each weekend day).

My logic was that if I only consider weekends for my scheduled hours, almost anything could come up during the week and it wouldn’t matter and any time studied during the week would be extra and kind of a buffer.

I also made sure to really stick to 5 hours effective study time, meaning if I started to wonder off into the internet or whatever, I would add additional hours that day. You always have downer days where you just quit after 3 or 4 hrs, but that is normal I guess, as long as they are very limited.

So those are the pros.

Cons:

  1. to maintain level of commitment during 9 months is really not easy.

  2. if you work those hours during the week and put in an additional 10 to 12 hours of effective study time on weekends, you have no time for other things. (Typical weekend-day: sleep in because you are exhausted from the week, have breakfast around noon, start studying, after 3 hrs a one hour break and 2 to 3 hours after the break. Before you know it is dark outside and the day is over).

  3. around the last two months you really must start to go back to refresh what you studied at the start. It is much harder to make it stick. So I scheduled my strongest topics early on, which also means you ease into it.

  4. Towards the end (last month or so) I started to do TTs during lunch time and at night from 11pmish to 1amish if I wasn’t too tired. Also, my direct supervisors kind of took it a little bit easier on me during the last weeks.

Summarizing: It works, but it is a huge commitment to start out that early. It basically prolongs the gruesome experience for a couple of months. Did I feel prepared going into the exam? Yes. 100%? No, but who does?

#9

Worked 40-45 hours per week during studying and took the last two weeks off as educational leave.

I agree that the key is to set up a clear schedule. I set up mine roughly as follows:

  • Allocate topics across available study days in accordance with the approximate exam weight;

  • Make sure that each topic is allocated in a way that the study days include weekends;

  • Decrease intervals for revising different topic areas when approaching the exam;

  • Set targets for each day.

And as mentioned before, the key is to stick to it - which goes both ways for me: If i fall behind, I catch up on the weekend. If I am faster than expected, reward yourself with a day off in order not to burn out.

#10

I worked full time and took level 2. Its difficult to say the least, but i agree with everyone else. Maintaining a schedule and routine is key. I live in California, but work east coast market hours, so basically worked from 6-3 every day. I blocked off an hour for lunch every day to study, and then would study from 4-7 each day when i got home. I tried to study about 3 hours Sat & Sunday as well, but also tried to make sure i had time to get outside and do some hiking or diving or any of my hobbies to maintain some health & sanity. Our busiest time at work is the week before the exam (last week in May), so was working 12 hour days and got very little studying done. Hopefully the preparation leading up to the exam was enough so that the last week did not matter. I started after new years, so had a solid 5 months to prepare.

#11

Well, I juggled it all by deciding not to be a lil bitch and handling responsibility like a boss.

#12

Yeah, that’s a tough way to do it. Kudos to you for sticking with it. Good luck come end of July!

#13

Thanks friends for sharing your experiences. Valuable feedback indeed. Wishing all of you success in the exam for the efforts

#14

Wow kudos. Really appreciate the info as this will likely be me soon.

#15

Worked 65-80 hours a week while studying. Started studying late March (was traveling too much for work). Studying was pretty on and off - on days I was in the office till midnight or later, it would be impossible to study. But I tried really hard to leave by 10pm at the latest and study till I couldn’t do it anymore (usually like 1-2am). But that meant I was sleeping between 4-6 hours on the weekdays. Weekends were basically spent working and studying where I could. I usually took Friday night off and sometimes Saturday nights off to hang out/grab a few drinks with buddies to keep my sanity. Found that I could really only do like ~8 hour sessions on the weekend before it wasn’t going anywhere.

With two weeks to go - I was pretty screwed and decided to take two weeks off work. Luckily my team was able to handle most things in my absence and I only had to put in limited time throughout the two weeks. Crushed like 12 hour study days for two weeks straight and overall was happy with the effort I put in.

I really don’t think it’s that difficult to study + work at the same time, especially if you work pretty regular hours. But your life will suck for awhile.

#16

When I was studying for these exams I was working at PIMCO. I was blessed with a wife who took care of our three children and agreed to pretend that I didn’t exist from January through May for each of three years. I studied 2 hours each night after work, at least four hours each Saturday, and at least four hours each Sunday.

#17

Must’ve been incredibly difficult, but I imagine this is often the reality for most candidates who want to successfully get through the program.

#18

Full-time here and because I lacked the time to study previously, I decided that I am making sure that last week’s exam will be my last Level 2 attempt. Because the only work leave I could really expect from my job is a full week before the exam, I had to make some steps in my life to finally get things done.

Strategies that worked:

  1. Started studying December. 2. Taking advantage of every holiday to study. 3. Alternating readings. For example, one reading on FRA then afterwards switch to Corp Fin, then the reading on Derivatives, etc. 4. Exercising between study sessions during the weekday/weekend to make the brain absorb more and combat burnout. My home is an hour away from work by foot so from the office, I walk/jog 30 mins, then dinner/study at a separate place, then walk/jog 30 mins more and study at home. 5. Maintain a 7.5+ hour daily sleep schedule to let my brain put what I learned into long-term memory (power of REM sleep). 6. Mind-maps, mnemonics to memorize faster. 7. When you make your study schedule, allow extra buffer time for real life things and sudden increases in office workload.

  2. In May, listening to free YouTube videos on some of the topics (to test your overall level of understanding of the readings). 9. Prayer.

Other things:

  1. On the first pass of the CFAI readings, blue boxes, and EOCs, ideally this should be finished in Feb-March but I managed to finish in April. Don’t focus on memorizing formulas. Doing the blue boxes and EOCs will significantly help you memorize them. 2. Now that I think about it, prep providers should help one understand a large portion of the readings faster (CFAI material is relatively heavy but imho still needs to be read, as seemingly “obscure” side-topics usually come out of the exam). 3. On the second (and if there is time, future passes) of the CFAI readings/BBs/EOCs, one can understand them a lot more and remember some more formulas. 4. By this time, when you do CFAI TTs/mocks you should be able to remember most of the formulas. I started mocks in April and then did one every two weeks.

Good luck!

#19

Thanks Earldd for sharing in detail your strategy. Very valuable indeed. Best wishes on your success

#20

I am working working full time as an associate portfolio manager. Sticking to a schedule is key. I created a spreadsheet to track my hours and pace. Originally aiming for 400 study hours knowing full well that I would slack here and there. I started early in september and went with the tortoise vs hare approach. I tried studying on my lunch at first but that habit didn’t last long since I needed the mental break from work. What I found worked well was 1 hour per week night after my daughter went to sleep then 2 hours both Saturday and Sunday during my daughter’s naps. I only used cfai curriculum and made my own cue cards. If I’m unsuccessful in passing the exam it will be because I didn’t dedicate enough time to drill practice questions.

In hindsight I would have started the cfa designation journey right out of university and prior to having children.