Most Important Skills For An Investment Banking Associate At Middle Market Bank
Jonathan, an Investment Banking Associate, highlights the evolution of necessary skills throughout a career in the industry, starting with "attention to detail" and "analytics heavy" work involving data processing, progressing to strong "communication" and "client relations" at senior levels, and culminating in the "sales component" required for director and managing director roles to "bring in business". This progression underscores the increasing importance of interpersonal and business development skills alongside technical expertise.
Attention to Detail, Data Analysis, Communication, Client Relations, Sales
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Jonathan Freeman
Investment Banking Associate
Middle Market Investment Bank
CWRU
UCSD Master of Finance, UCLA FTMBA
Economics
Finance (Banking, Fintech, Investing)
Finance
Student Athlete
Video Highlights
1. Attention to detail is crucial for maintaining professional presentation standards.
2. Strong analytical skills are needed to process large amounts of data quickly and identify patterns.
3. Communication and client relations skills become increasingly important with career progression, transitioning to sales and business development at senior levels.
Transcript
What skills are most important for a job like yours?
The skills that are important change as you go up the chain in terms of levels. One thing that's important throughout is just attention to detail.
Investment banking and client services are very buttoned-up industries. You want all of your presentations to look very professional and very clean, so the standards are just very high when it comes to aesthetics.
There's also a really analytics-heavy portion of the job where you need to process a lot of different data. You're getting a lot of different data points from companies at once and you have to process those in Excel or whatever data tools your bank is using.
Being able to do those things quickly and put things together, and basically identify patterns in new data, is really important. As you move up to senior associate or VP, your level of communication needs to be there. I would call that client relations.
When you get to director level, that's where there starts to be a sales component. You need to be a salesperson as a director or managing director and actually bring in business. Those are some of the skills as you go up the chain.