How To Become An Investment Banker

Goldman Sachs, Apollo Global, JP Morgan, Bain Capital, BlackRock, Sequoia. All high powered firms that most people can only dream about. Most students will spend hours reading step-by-step guides like this trying to learn how to become an investment banker with no experience.

Why? That’s because of investment banks only want to hire candidates with experience, that includes recent college graduates who have never even had a formal job. Recently, there’s been an unusual increase in lesser qualified candidates landing these prestigious jobs over even graduates from Ivy league schools.

One major contributor?

The Invest Like the Street Analyst Program

But why?

How ToGet Experience In Investment Banking Without A Previous Internship Or Job? Wall Street is known for being notoriously hard when it comes to landing a job or internship.

Every year, students from the top schools in the world compete against each other to land a high-paying job or internship at investment banks.

Can you blame them? The average investment banking salary plus bonus will easily net these students more than $100,000 a year. No wonder it’s such a competitive field.

So how are lesser qualified candidates beating out students from Ivy league colleges for these jobs?

Here’s one example:

Every year Harvard University holds its annual stock pitch competition. They receive hundreds of pitches from groups of students across the country and have the tough task of narrowing it down to the Top 15 groups to come present in the final round, live in front of a panel of judges.

As you might expect, most of the groups of students come from Ivy League schools. But this year there was an outlier: a group of students from a non-Ivy school made it to finals.

So how did they do it?

According to Max, one of the students who made it to the finals from the non-target school (the University of Connecticut), there was one main culprit:

An analyst training program called The Invest Like the Street Analyst Program that is helping students stand out in interviews and land more jobs by giving them real, on-the-job assignments that Wall Street firms expect their employees to learn.

But why does that work?

According to a testimonial from Max: “The Invest Like the Street program was the biggest factor in our success in the competition. The ILTS program taught us how to find stock ideas, build accurate financial models and valuations, and how to write a stock report.

Our business school curriculum doesn’t teach us any of those skills so without ILTS we probably wouldn’t have made it past the first round of the competition.”

So far it’s working. Students who have completed the program have gone on to land jobs and internships at investment banks, hedge funds and wealth management firms.

The #1 Thing Investment Banks Look For In Candidates

The reason the programs like the Invest Like The Street Analyst Program has been key in helping students land these internships and jobs because it’s showing employers that these students can do the work required at investment banks, hedge funds, and wealth management firms.

Employers on Wall Street want to hire students that actually know what they’re doing.

They want to see that you understand investing, financial analysis, modeling, etc. They love hiring students with real-world, practical experience.

Graduates from these types of programs, like Invest Like The Street’s, end up knowing as much as an experienced Investment Banker or buy-side analyst that the people interviewing graduates are usually so blown away by how much these students know at such a young age that it’s an easy hiring decision for them, regardless of GPA and school.

Programs like Invest Like The Street’s work like this:

1. Students get one-on-one training with an instructor to mimic real-world situations and get feedback at the same time
2. Students cover topics such as understanding different business models, how to break down and analyze a business, financial analysis, and accounting, DCF modeling, advanced modeling, how to pitch a stock, and how to write research reports.
3. Each student is given a publicly traded company to complete a variety of assignments on during the program, such as building models, and have to submit each assignment for us to review and get feedback on. Therefore, each student gets the hands-on experience to complete real on-the-job work, versus just watching an instructional video which can be boring.
4. Students are given plenty of support in terms of career thing such as resume editing, networking, interviewing practice, etc, so they are able to effectively take their knowledge and land the job

Conclusion

If you’re trying to learn how to become an investment banker or trying to figure out how to get into wall street, you might want to consider a program like Invest Like The Street’s that can give you the experience to bolster your resume.

Unlike most online courses, you won’t be totally falling asleep watching videos! Besides that, putting in a good deal of networking with people in the industry can dramatically increase your odds of breaking in.