hailtothevictors wrote:
sniperssk wrote:
If you work in corporate finance in industry, you won't be recording transactions as you won't be an accountant, but you'll still be dealing with accounting info. This is also true for IB. Wherever you go, you won't be handed decision making responsibilities right away. All entry-level jobs are processing/execution jobs - you just do what someone else has told you to. In consulting you gather and analyze data and put together PPTs, in corpfin you analyze data and project trends, in IB you process data in order to create models and pitchbooks. In most cases, you will need at least several years before you are put into a decision-making role. Just find a career that you think you will like and stick it to it for several years - if you are good, you will be given more responsibilites with time.
You make an excellent point about all entry level jobs being *complain* work mostly and I guess I'll have to suck it up for 2-5 years and just do it. I just wanted to make sure that for corporate finance I won't just be a pseudo-accountant for the rest of my life. I know that entry level will probably be a lot of accounts reconciliation, closing entries, data gathering, etc. but I just wanted to make sure that this doesn't keep happening at the senior levels and at the senior levels you start doing more decision-making, modeling, etc. Has anyone on these boards worked at more senior levels within a company and can comment on what, for example, a VP of Finance, Director of Finance, etc. does typically? Basically, for people who come in after an MBA as a financial analyst for a company, what would they do?
Look, it depends on several things. First, which function in finance you are actually in - treasury, corporate development, planning, etc. I really doubt that you will be closing entries and reconcile accounts at the MBA level - nobody would pay you 100-120k to do something that someone else would do for 50k. Besides, that job is for accountants. Accounting is about writing the story of what happened, finance is about telling why it happened and what will most likely happen in the future. Of course, doing analyses and projections in finance will require you to delve deeper into accounting data in order to understand what happened, but you will not be required to make accounting entries. You will need to understand how entries are made and you cannot escape understanding accounting in finance, but you will be hired for jobs that require more coordination and project management than something that a clerk with no college degree could do. Second, what you will exactly do will depend on the company and how it has organized its finance function and its finance program, if they have one. You might be rotated across jobs every 2-3 years in order to understand the business, but that varies by company, so there's no definitive answer. As for what exactly you would do as a financial analyst after an MBA, I think it would be something that uses your coordination and communication skills in addition to your analytical skills. The basic stuff is to be given a problem, gather data (you cannot escape that thing in any job), analyze it, present it in PPT to some of your managers, make recommendations for solutions, coordinate the process as you will need to interface with different people to get things done. For example, you might be asked to measure the profitability of certain investments or do an analysis on a competitor. As you progress, you will be given the responsibility to manage not only processes, but also supervise people who in turn manage processes - that's what managers and VPs do.