Which companies would recruit you if you are FRM?

Hi All

I apologise for not being able to reply to your comments as I was stuck up at my new job. This post is in reply to questions asked by Vijit from IIT Roorkee. I have decided to answer it by writing a new post and I will answer them in parts.

'Will companies recruit me if I clear FRM, even though I am from a non-finance background and have not done MBA'.

The simple and plain answer to this is "YES". I am a 2007 batch graduate in Mechanical Engg from IIT Roorkee. I first joined GE, combustion team, which involved designing and work heavily oriented towards mechanical engg. I passed FRM in 2007 and got next job in HSBC as Analyst in Consumer & Mortgage Lending. Now I have joined Deutsche Bank as Analyst in Mumbai. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a MBA and there are many people like me who are working in all these banks..

Let me first clear out the myth about working for a "Finance" firm. In most of the banks, when an engineer is hired , most of the times he gets involved in "Glorified Coding". I mean you analyse big datasets and churn out the final numbers and then try to make a business sense to it. By no means I intend to say that its a useless job but the fact is that, in most of these places no one expects you to know anything about finance at all, as far as analyst level is concerned . If you know, it helps , but even if you don't - IT's FINE... I can tell you from my experience that the real learning, especially in Finance, occurs only when you work in a related office. These degrees like MFE, MBA, FRM , CFA , is about adding credentials on your resume, networking and making a strong point that " YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT".

After FRM, you stand a strong chance of working in a risk analytics division of a bank. So companies like, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC should be your targets. Like in DB, we have a strong risk management team , and we work extensively with options, swaps, CDS, CDO's and other derivatives...

I would be writing other posts very soon and will answer any more follow up questions you may have from your side.

BG