Hello, I’ve recently finished a master in finance and passed the CFA level I. I’ve been looking for jobs a couple of months and now I got 2 job offers.
The first one is as credit analyst. It isn’t my dream job because it’s basically being in front of a computer analyzing data and calculating risks and forecasts. However they offer me a good contract and it seems a very stable job where most guys work there for many years.
The second one is a job in mergers and acquisitions of a big company. It seems a more enjoyable job but they offer me a 1 year internship with no guarantee after that and it seems really hard to develop a career there without contacts. If after 1 year they kick me out it may be difficult to get the other job in M&A with only 1 year of experience and because they usually hire people from prestigious universities but maybe I can get a job in an investment firm.
It’s important to note that I’m from Spain and we have 20% unemployment and almost 50% youth unemployment so the stability is certainly valuable.
You are still young, if I were you I’d definitely go for the M&A, albeit it can be very slow sometimes in corporate M&A so ask about expected deal flow, etc before you take the offer. M&A experience on a resume is much more attractive to future employers than credit analyst. Secondly what kind of credit analyst job is it? is it credit risk or actual credit analyst analyzing company fundamentals, those two are very different with the later being much more attractive in the long run.
I would personally strongly steer away from credit risk roles. The pay will be ok in the long run but it’s very boring and not that much transferrable.
What are the historical odds of getting a job from the M&A department after the internship? If they hire 70% of interns, maybe that’s a good deal. If they hire 10%, then maybe it’s not so good.
From my perspective, even if he does not get the full-time offer, one-year M&A internship experience will still be extremely valuable in obtaining a full-time offer somewhere else if OP can effectively network. Only real concern I have is that corporate M&A tend to involve more deal sourcing than actual modeling. It all depends on what kind of experience he can get during the internship.
I have no way of knowing that. In the interview I asked if it was possible to get a contract after the internship but they only said that I had to focus on learning and if I showed them I was good at it everything was possible. In fact right know they can´t hire anybody (they can do internships though). I don´t know if it´s the same in other countries but they fired a lot of people recently in a reorganization and they are still negotiating with the fired people and under the spanish law they have to end that process before hiring new people (they have been 2 years or so negotiating). However it’s likely that it will end in the next few months.
Do the 1 year M&A internship hands down. Worst case scenario if you don’t get hired on full-time after 1 year it will still look really good on your resume. Even a 3-6 month unpaid internship will look a little more lucrative on the resume than the credit risk job.
From personal experience, I did a 6 month unpaid M&A stint at a very local firm and landed a research analyst job at an asset management firm (now a portfolio manager). A guy I worked with who was there for 6 months ended up joining the utilities IB group at Wells Fargo. Another guy who was there for like 9 months I think, he ended up getting an associate level job at some PE firm in Baltimore.