Have a BSc and MSc in Operations Research from Columbia Univeristy, mid 3.3-3.4 undergrad GPA, 3.8 graduate GPA. My majors were veyr quantitative with heavy coursework in math, econ, finance, and comp sci. I have 1.5 years of full time work experience, the first at a fund of hedge funds, and now I’m working at a commercial bank with credit analysis as one of my main responsibilities. I’m looking ideally to get into investment/asset management/equity research. I was never a great programmer and my programming skills have deteriorated considerably to the point where I’d have to relearn since I’ve never used it outisde of college. I’m taking the CFA level 1 exam in June and hoping this will be that extra boost to get me into investment management.
CFA can’t hurt in your case, but I guess the question is whether it will help enough to justify all the time and work that goes into it.
For me, I had a non-finance background, so the CFA helped a lot in terms of convincing people I know something about financial matters. Your operations research stuff should help, and Columbia is a name brand university.
If you want to do credit analysis, I suspect that is good. People love to talk about equities, but there are probably more opportunities in fixed income. It’s a larger market and lots of organizations are trying to do asset-liability management, which is a place where fixed income is more important.
Your question was “will a CFA help”. That answer is yes. of course it won’t hurt you. But similar to buying a 2nd lottery ticket, you may have increased your chances of winning the jackpot, but overall, your chances are still very unlikely.
technically , your fund of funds is an asset management shop, but of course what you mean is being on the ground actually picking the securites and investments.
Realistically, it’s very tough for you since there is very little transferrable skills from what you do now into equity research. Asset management, you may have some transferable skills if you deal with credit.
^ despite all this, there are peeps who have studied classic greek , have no cfa and are investment managers…u see them being interviewd on bloomberg sometimes 
^ Of course there are. Just as there are people who win the $500MM powerball.
most of those people were recruiting right out of their school, are connected with the right people, graduated during a stellar time of hiring, or some combination thereof. You have to look at his scenario now in today’s atrocious finance job market. agree?
Remember that iteracom is not our resident optimist here. His standard response to “will X help me get a job” is “your chances are slim-to-none.”
Often times he’s right, but I think you have a better chance than most, realtalk.
If you are an operations research person, you’d probably be more suited to going the quantitative investing and algorithmic trading route, rather than the equity research route. You also sound like someone who probably should be targeting credit analysis or interest rate analysis or even FX over equities unless you just can’t imagine yourself doing that. If you are going to target equity research, then make sure you can do the accounting part of suff correctly. CFA can help with that somewhat, though it’s only a start.
We just hired a quant guy who was previously in operations research. So yes, a lot of the work is transferable. I would encourage you to look beyond “investment management” as a possible career path. There are many kinds of careers in finance that are equally desireable (from objective measures anyway). Many of these will use more of your quantitative skills than asset management.