Right Reasons for pursuing CFA

Career Enhancement – You are already working in a financial institution – namely commercial banks, investment banks, mutual funds, rating agencies etc. Your job description may be or may not be related to investments. I mean if you are in equity research department then you have all the reasons to pursue CFA. But in case you are far from investment decision making, say data analytics even then pursuing a CFA makes sense as you can move horizontally across domains within the firm. Some of these candidates already have a MBA/MS Finance.

Career Change – A good percentage of CFA candidates fall in this category. You are working totally far away from even the smell of finance and you wish to make an entry into the club. You are in IT, Operations, engineering etc. Basically you are stuck in a hole/dead end job. A bit of warning of most of you - CFA alone will not help you to move into the finance side. You will have to do a lot of networking. Few things that can make your transition easier are - having work experience which might be useful along with CFA Knowledge. For example you have Excel-VBA experience and banks need someone to do some excel plumbing in such a case having a CFA L1/L2 will make your entry more probable.

Profile Improvement - Some of us are in dead end jobs and also have experience that is not useful to banks. Such mortals have to get a post graduate degree like MBA/Masters in Finance/Masters in Financial Engineering to move into finance. CFA L1/L2/L3 will bolster your profile showing your interest in finance as well as ability to handle the academic rigour of a post graduate degree. This necessity of getting a degree may sound a bit pessimistic but can be a blessing in disguise. The reason being if you belong to the Excel VBA type mentioned above then you may get an instant boost in terms of higher salary but you would be far away from the real deal. Thus pursuing a higher degree solves the problem once for all. The candidates falling in this category ironically have the highest passing rate.

CAT Frustrated Aspirant – You are a CAT frustrated aspirant who thinks IIMs are not worth spending years solving Quant, DI and VA , at least not un till you are in a reasonable position in your career. A good analogy would be a PhD student who becomes so disillusioned by academics that he wants to try corporate even though he never thought about it in his earlier phase of his life. CAT is a common entrance exam that selects management students based on their ability to solve quickly QA, DI, VA problems.