Work experience for the charter

CFA General
#1

Hey all, just looking for an answer from somebody who’s been there (the charterholders). If you’ve read any of my posts recently you’ll know my job out of university (starting next month) will be as a business analyst with an oil & gas services firm, and until something better comes up I’m going to stay there- realistically for 2 years before I start to stress about getting out, as per my current plan, and this coincides with doing my exams (level 1 in dec).

My question is, how strict is CFAI about your work experience to get the charter? I know it’s four years, but I’m not entirely sure if they’d accept this position as experience. If not, it would definately push me to be more aggressive in getting into finance.

I don’t have a good job description, so I’ll explain by way of example. As a summer student, I was responsible for several projects: using historical maintenance data to build a cost-optimized preventative maintenance schedule on the entire fleet, based on different makes/purposes etc. (ie, rebuild the pumps on the frac pumpers every X tons of proppant pumped, so that that cost is cheaper than the lost revenue of having one break down on the job); determining if the cost of building a regional maintenance facility for heavy repairs would be more cost effective than sending the trucks to third parties, based primarily on lost revenues through wait times; updating our services price book. This was as a summer student, but now that I’ll be on as a full-time analyst, I’ll primarily be analysing bids based on discounts, ROIC, contribution margins, profitability etc.

So as you can see, there is a lot of financial accumen required for this work, but it’s not exactly “CFA finance”. Do you figure it would count if I did it for all four years? What about just one year? Just wondering how strict they are about the relevance of the work experience…

Cheers

#2

Try searching, this topic has been discussed thoroughly many times over covering many scenarios.

#3

Something like 80% or 90% of L1 candidates eventually abandon the CFA program rather than completing it.

At this point, you would be wise to focus on studying for the Level I exam, rather than worrying about the subtleties of the CFAI experience requirements.

#4

If someone aged 60, working in a non-finance area, and wants to go into college finance teaching as a result of completing CFA L3 requirement, would that make a difference to the guys up there?

#5

the teaching will count as work experience so you’ll get the charter what 3 years after you get the job

#6

Thanks…but that’s dumb of CFAI as I need the charter to get the job! In addition, would teaching for 3 years make me a better charter holder?

#7

That is the beauty of CFAI compare to other designation. They wanted people who have real life asset managemetn experience to become CFA charterholder. Sorry if people are in this catch 22.

#8

It depends on what you DO at your current role, rather than your company’s industry or even your team’s specialisation. My charterholder experience includes experience at advertising firms and tech firms, so I think you’ll be fine. Read the exact requirements of what they’re looking for, and be sure to highlight the aspects that would be relevant.