I Escaped!

Well, I did it! If you couldn't tell from the abrupt end to the blog posts last summer, I actually got a new job!

I successfully transitioned my career from the depths of the windowless staff room in a big 4 public accounting firm to a front office role, sitting on the trading floor of a buy-side asset management firm. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm still qualified as a CPA after all, my job is not as glamorous as my fancy new title sounds, but it's infinitely better than public accounting. If I could give anyone who is dissatisfied in accounting any advice, it's to interview and expand your world of opportunity.

Time for a brief postmortem:

How I got the job:
The sad truth about leaving accounting is that it's an uphill climb, the happy truth is that it is possible. You need to have a great story, and, in every interview, you need to answer the question "why should I hire an accountant?", I had to at least. Applying to jobs is a numbers game. The more resumes you send, the more the chances you get to interview. Also, the sooner you submit your resume to the new job posting, the better the probability it actually gets looked at. Applying the simple expected value theory will give you the secret strategy: apply to as many of the fresh job postings as possible.

Practice, practice, practice interviewing. Take as many interviews as you can get, even if you're not crazy about the position. The interview allows you to practice your interviewing skills, better hone your answers, and you get the absolute best networking experience imaginable: you get the opportunity to explain your resume and story to someone looking to hire. In some cases, even when I didn't get the job I had interviewed for, the hiring managers recommended me for other open positions in which I was interested! Talk about effective networking!

The more interviews I went on, the more confident I became, and I think it's ultimately is just a confidence game.  I was absolutely destroyed on my first interview: nervous and jittery answers, poor eye contact, low volume and unsure tone of voice.  I actually cracked under the pressure of that first quantitative brain teaser and incorrectly answered what would be the easiest of all the brain teasers I would get asked during my job search. With each successive interview, my answers to the standard questions became more smooth and my delivery became dialed in. "Why are you looking to leave accounting? What do you actually do on a day to day basis?  Why is your experience applicable to this new role? Tell me about a time when X happened and how you dealt with it." I was getting really good at answering the quantitative questions, and I had my story down pat.

One memorable question was "How do you deal with making mistakes and how do you feel about having to ask for help?" In the swagger of my interviewing confidence, my response was: "I think I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'm able to figure most things out relatively quickly. If something doesn't make sense to me, a lot of times it means something is missing in the communication, and so I'm not worried about asking clarifying questions."  I literally told the interviewer I was a "smart guy" and if I don't understand it means something actually doesn't make sense.  It doesn't sound too smart prima facie, but given the right tone and context, it made me sound like a boss.

What I expected on the job:
Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. When I asked in the interview what the day to day was like, the spoke in their industry terms that made no sense to me. The same way I got blown away by the audit staff when I was interviewing for my first job, I got blow away by the quality of these people as well. I interviewed with portfolio managers, assistant portfolio managers and research analysts, who spoke about yield curves, spreads, duration and convexity analysis, and credit ratings. The spoke of interesting work like trade allocations and making investment decisions. The same way the idea of preparing financial statements and interacting with valuation experts appealed to me in auditing, the asset management industry's decision making prospects called to me.

As with all jobs, its not a cool as it sounds. There's a reason that someone is paying you to do it: there's going to be shitty parts.

Where to go from here:
The best part of this job is the exposure to all aspects of asset management and the buy-side of the capital markets. On a daily basis I'm exposed to everyone from our traders, the investment bankers, ratings agency analysts, our internal analysts, the quant team, middle office and operations professionals, financial advisers who's clients capital we manage, and the senior portfolio managers who call the shots.