Graduated with BCOM in Finance last April with a bad GPA and zero relevant experience. Have been unlucky in landing a relevant job so I have been studying by myself and taking courses and certifications and etc. Today my friend reviewed my resume and he casually mentioned that I have a lot of certifications/training.
I’m wondering if it’s a bad thing? Here’s what I currently have:
CFA Level I Candidate ( I only include this if the job description mentions that interest in the CFA is an asset)
Canadian Securities Course (CSC)
Financial Modeling - FactSet
Bloomberg Market Concepts - Bloomberg
Data Analysis in Python - DataCamp
Applied Finance in R - DataCamp
Introduction to SQL and Joining Data in PostgreSQL - DataCamp
for bilingual jobs I include my Fluency in French certification from Duolingo.
I wouldn’t say those are certifications. A Monkey can be a Level I candidate with $1000. The rest are mainly skills. Nothing wrong with listing skills.
Maybe your GPA sunk you? In which case that’s on you bro.
Just get a job, any job. How are you affording the rent?
Not to sound harsh… but is it really “unlucky” if you graduated with bad GPA and no relevant experience?
Otherwise, I agree with your friend and would probably remove everything other than CSC and CFA L1 candidate (your approach makes sense here).
Under the skills section of your resume, you can just put that you are proficient in Bloomberg, R, SQL and etc… so that HR can check off the boxes when they filter through hundreds of resumes.
No, not unlucky…You’ve paved your own destiny up to this point. Your main and really only job during junior high and high school was to do your school work and get into a reputable college which in Canada is not as tough to do as in the US…Once enrolled in college, again your sole primary job was to focus on your school work and excel at classes because well that is your job…Now You went to a mediocre college and a bad GPA…This tells me either you’re lazy or dumb or both…In either case, it’s risky to hire someone like you when I see 20 U of T finance graduates and 15 McGill graduates with solid IB interns also with good connections hitting me up for 1 position that is open…no brainer…
No one would pick you out of so many other quality candidates, especially since you don’t have any relevance experiences. Best bet, try to get into one of those one year masters with somewhat decent placement and go from there. You’d just continue to run into a wall on your current path. Real talk.
This is probably the best advice. Also try to get an internship while doing your master’s, and make sure you have a good GPA- it needs to be a 3.5 at the very lowest. Many people would suggest leaving off your master’s GPA, and some schools even have a non-disclosure policy that won’t allow you to put your master’s GPA on your resume; however, in your case, you need to put it on there given the bad undergrad GPA.
again, it’s not us, it is you…For example, say you were a Stanford Uni finance grad and has either an IB with Goldman or equity research with American Funds lined up…The replies would be very very different indeed…
Don’t blame others or call it “unlucky”…All of that plus whatever you call it is right in front of the mirror staring blankly at you.
Let’s not generalize…It is highly dependent on the people…If they had their head up their tight dark cylindrical echo chamber of their arse for their college years…all they hear is their own echo and do not see anything, hence they see what they imagine and hear what they say…This is the result of not universities but one self…He or she did not explore, read books, articles, talk to real world people, internships and did i mention books?
The problem is kids these days…some kids who lack intellectual curiosity and/or intellect in general or lazy (the most dangerous form), merely read the headlines of a news that hedge fund or finance guys make on average $450k or billionaire fund manager said x or y…without going in any further they just start day dreaming…the day dream becomes their “reality” and when someone says otherwise, it is deemed “nonsense”
Of course I agree with you that there are exceptional candidates that are coming out of school, and yes - the onus is ultimately on the student to broaden their horizons and build a career for themselves.
Having said all that, the universities are not innocent in all this given how much students (or their parents) pay for tuition to help these kids “open their eyes”. Some professors are great, but most have no real professional experience and are life long academics that can only talk theoretically. Most of them sit there telling students that they are the future and give terrible advice (won’t go into all the examples I have seen). In my opinion, this only contributes to the increase in sense of entitlement.
OP, including all those meaningless certificates is like advertising that you can wipe your butt without help. You should focus on things that actually matter. What you should really do is find some resumes of successful candidates and see what is different between theirs and yours. It can be painful because this exercise will reveal how much you truly suck, but you need to do it to improve.