Introduction
Investment banking has long been a lucrative field that has attracted freshers and experienced finance experts alike. The investment banking field entails raising capital for an organization, managing IPOs, mergers, acquisitions, and the debt-equity profile of a company. All these functions require specialized skills, years of training, and experience. That is why investment banking roles are not easily offered to inexperienced and untrained individuals.
However, it’s not impossible to land an investment banking roles with no experience. Your profile should speak for itself and convince recruiters that you can be a good fit for the role. To do that, you need an impeccable resume. Here’s how you can make one.
Define A Crisp Structure and Format
The first thing that gets your resume noticed and eventually selected is how well it is structured. Whether an employer uses recruitment partners or AI software to screen resumes, your profile can get shortlisted if it is easy to read and doesn’t waste the recruiter’s time.
Therefore, define a crisp structure and functional format for your investment banking resume before you start writing it. It’s important to have a functional format as you don’t have any experience highlighting, but you can certainly focus on your skills and competencies.
Start by framing a summary of your personal and professional self. Include your interest in the investment banking field and establish how you have been training towards that objective. Follow the summary with your educational background, skills, competencies, training, internships, and relevant information that showcases transferable skills for an investment banking profile.
You can learn about – Basics of Resume Writing
Presenting Your Education In the Best Way
When presenting your educational background in the best way, you must give more weightage to your higher education (bachelor’s and master’s degrees). Since investment banking is a specialized field, subjects and training programs that prepare you for this field are offered at the college level only.
Thus, follow a reverse chronological order of reporting your academic achievements. Include the following details in a tabular format or paragraph format:
- College/ University/ Institution from where you received your degree or diploma
- Year(s) of degree/ diploma completion
- Specialization or subjects taken
- Average Percentage score or CGPA
In addition to your academic score, you can also highlight details like academic awards won or any positions of responsibility held during your academic tenure. While extra-curricular and co-curricular activities are an essential part of your experience, only add those to your resume that shows you in a positive light as an investment banker.
Investment Banking Skills To Highlight
Next, focus on highlighting specific skills and competencies relevant to job roles in the investment banking domain. You may have acquired these as part of your formal education or specialized training and internships. The idea is to incorporate them into your resume in an eye-grabbing manner. Therefore, mention the relevant skills in a sidebar or in-line table. These could be:
- Financial modeling
- Valuation
- Debt Issuance (process exposure)
- Risk analysis and management
- Corporate restructuring
- Merger and Acquisition planning
- Merger process facilitation
- Financial statement analysis
- Strategic research and report writing
To strengthen your profile, you can also include soft skills such as communication, presentation, leadership, analytical ability, critical thinking, networking, etc.
In addition to these skills, mention specialized tools and platforms used for investment banking and in which you may be proficient. These could include:
- Bloomberg
- S&P Capital IQ
- Pitchbook
- Thomson Reuters Eikon
- Factset
- Equity RT
- Slack
- Trello
- MS Excel
Showcasing Internships, Projects, and Certifications
Although, as a fresher, your resume should be brief and impactful, it should still capture the essence of your achievements and abilities. Thus, the remaining space on your resume should be dedicated to showcasing internships, projects, and certifications relevant to investment banking roles. These internships and projects can be about:
- Accounting fundamentals
- Corporate valuation
- Mergers and acquisitions transactions
- IPO process
- Financial modeling and analysis
Include all manner of training programs or activities you may have undergone, whether your college organized them or you took them independently. Longer-duration internships and certifications can even earn you brownie points. Thus make sure to highlight them.
But if you haven’t done any of those, it’s alright to include short courses, projects, and training programs. Even self-assisted and virtual training can be included, as long as you have developed some quantifiable skills from them.
Maintaining Quality and Consistency
Finally, your resume is a snapshot of your personality and abilities. Most importantly, how well you can communicate and articulate in the written medium is expressed through your resume. Hence, proofread your resume and perform a thorough quality check before submitting it to any recruiter.
You can use freely available editing software to ensure there are no grammatical and spelling errors in your resume. You can also download some ready-made resume templates to learn how to represent useful information best.
Investment banking roles often require networking and good communication ability. Your resume shows that you are fit for those roles even without any experience, project confidence, and assertiveness. Maintain a professional and consistent tone throughout your resume, and your chances of selection will go significantly up.
You can learn about – Important tips while preparing a resume
Conclusion
Your resume is a crucial element of your career progression and finding the best employer. As an aspiring investment banker, you need to learn many skills and competencies to build a relevant resume. Further, to remain relevant in the dynamic job market, you have to upskill regularly and showcase the same in your resume.
By adopting a strategic approach while developing your resume, you can ensure that you are selected for the best investment banking opportunities. As you try to kickstart your investment banking career with no prior experience, it helps to find a one-stop platform that can help you learn, grow, and find the best opportunities.
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