“To work in the investment management side where you pick stocks from the ground up, I felt like I needed that extra training and credential” that the CFA provides, she said
Robin Young, chief executive officer of the online academy Behaving Wealthy, got an MBA from Webster University in 2006. She then actually started down the path toward getting her CFA but realized she didn’t need the technical certificate to continue to build her own business.
“Credentials help you open the door, but soft skills help you close the door,” she said.
Still, Young thinks there’s merit to the CFA program—particularly for candidates who don’t have deep family connections to money and power, or who face discrimination.
“When you want to stand in front of people who may give you resistance for whatever reason—race, class or age—it really levels the playing field,” Young, who is Black, said of the CFA program.
The pitch of MBA advocates is that the path to a successful finance career isn’t entirely through textbooks. One of the main benefits of business school is the connections with professors and fellow aspiring executives.
“Whenever someone asks me if an MBA is worth it, I will tell them you’re more or less going to forget 90% of what you learn and same with the CFA program,” said Kevin Frisz, a portfolio manager at William James & Co., a small hedge fund, who got an MBA rather than a CFA.
He got his first post-MBA job because the firm was recruiting on-campus. “The value that is most lasting with the MBA is the value of the networking,” he said. “There’s really no way I could’ve gotten in the door otherwise.”
The odds of getting into Harvard Business School or the Stanford Graduate School of Business—two of the top three programs in Bloomberg’s annual rankings—are just as daunting as passing all three CFA exams in three tries. It’s an even bigger challenge with middling undergraduate grades or a mediocre Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) score.
The CFA program, by contrast, abides by something closer to that famous line in the investing world: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Anyone can take the exam, no matter their grades or background.
The time-intensive aspect of the CFA program indicates to employers that a potential job candidate is committed to a finance career, said Keith Akre, a vice president at Stillman Bank in Rockford, Illinois. He has both a CFA charter and an MBA from Western Illinois University.
“The time required is intentional and part of the process,” he said. “It’s not just is this person smart enough, but it's measuring on a conscientiousness score to say: Is this person dedicated enough?”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.