Our consultants have just completed another hot summer of designing and delivering training for entry level bank sales and trading analysts in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. We continue to see a dangerous wedge that is beging driven between the tremendous amount of technical knowledge required for these entry-level jobs and the skills these applicants/new hires can bring to bear. The skillset is unable to keep up with the requirements because of the inability of undergraduate curricula to provide this information in practical "Desk Ready" format, as well as the dramatic reductions of training time provided by the banks themselves in response to cost cuts. This trend, which has become especially pronounced after 2000, is raising serious concerns in our view about the future of our industry. We are seeing new S&T analysts who have dedicated most, if not all, of their undergraduate coursework to finance, math, statistics, and computers. Thus, there is not much time left for liberal arts and social sciences!
However, we believe that if the financial industry is to thrive, we desparately need an influx of broadly educated young talent. The meltdown in 2007-2008 was due, in our opinion, to a combination of 1) over-reliance on mathmatical modeling and 2) short-term expectations of exhorbitant pay. In our opinion, the last thing we want for our industry going forward is an exclusive entry level class comprising those who have over-enrolled in all these math and finance courses whilst sacrificing their broader education.
We are actively working on solutions to this dangerous dilemma ... please read later posts as we develop more thoughts on this and related training issues.
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