A best friend of mine recently got an offer. She has Mater degree in finance as well as a CFA Level III candidate. She has almost 2 year fund accounting experience but she was trying to switch job since she does not want to do accounting anymore. Recently she got an offer and the base is 80k.
The new job would be very stressful, probably 80+ hours per week. We always study together and she does not know if she should switch her job when she is busy preparing the exam. But she is afraid that she would lose the opportunity and will not find a job with 20% pay raise. Another reason is she will collect another half of her bonus in April, but the new job requests her to start as soon as possible. She is not really willing to give up the money that she has already earned.
Sounds like she’s interested in it mainly for a “20% pay raise”. 80K for 80 hours is effectively 40k. An admin assistant makes more than that in DC/NY and probably has a higher quality of life given he/she works 9-5 and has time to take showers and eat meals and stuff at home. I know…future earnings potential blah blah blah. I wouldn’t recommend this 80hr/week life to someone I care about. But I guess some people really enjoy waking up at 6am every day to commute for an hour to their office and come home at midnight and sleep for however many hours that they’re not awake worrying about how they’re going to finish the work they couldn’t get done despite giving 80+ hours of their week?
Tell her to take the job, you didn’t really mention the nature of this other job but I assume it’s investment banking or something like that based on the expected hours. Fund accounting is horrible.
80K is base, but what’s the bonus situation like? is it a 100% target?
Job / Experience > CFA Charter.
Charter can be done later and Level III isn’t as time intensive as Level II. Take the job if the bonus is decent. If not, wait on a better offer.
Also, she can explain her April bonus situation and potentially negotiate a signing bonus? Although given her experience, they may just move onto the next candidate because they don’t believe she wants it enough.
Thank you for all your advice!! My friend ends up declining the offer and wanted to prepare for the exam first, and she will start to look for another after the test!!
What kind of finance? It doesn’t matter, none of us know this person, noone cares. Its just that if your friend gave up a good role doing ER or IB or something so she could spend more time on the CFA, while staying in the back office, then she’s just an idiot and made a huge mistake
It is a new established department in a company which needs person desperately. Thats the reason they bumped her salary that much and the long hours needed.
Bro just say what it is. Corporate development? Compliance? What? Was it primarily investment analysis? Why are you being so evasive? This is the only thing that really matters here, and it doesn’t even matter any more. I’m just curious.
My guess as well. Probably sort of a financial analyst within finance dept which is accounting named differently. However, while fund accounting may grant you qualifying experience, the new role would not, so I say the choice was correct.