Should i cfa

Whilst completing an Accounting qualification such as the ACA or CPA in the United States is a great move for your career and gives you an evergreen safety net in terms of your future salary, it is not the qualification of choice within certain other lucrative financial industries. If you hope to break into the highly competitive Investment banking, equity research, portfolio management or hedge fund arena, the CFA is a popular designation to start the process.

This qualification, more than many other, has the ability to dramatically increase your future earnings potential. In research carried out by Hours. One part of this equation is your income.

That kind of money invested and compounded over time certainly moves the needle in terms of achieving your financial independence goals and will allow you to become financially independent significantly faster. Both of these things are looked at in more depth below. As mentioned above, there are 3 levels of the CFA charter and the topics within each level are broken down as follows:.

As you can see, Level 1 of the course gives a broad overview and looks to provide candidates with a strong basis in accounting and finance. By the time you get to Level 3, certain topics like Quantitative Methods Maths and statistics are scrapped from the syllabus and are taken as assumed knowledge.

You can read more about this here. As alluded to above, there will be a substantial portion of the CFA content which is a direct overlap with your Accountancy qualification training. Finally, a good angle to consider is whether you have alternative options to achieve your goals without the CFA qualification. Hi Toto, thanks for your comments! Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.

You can also subscribe without commenting. Should I Take It? Want to pass your exams? Start preparing the right way. The answer really depends on you, your career goals and what you make of it. This is a huge amount of time that you could have spent with your family and friends; for working hard and get the recognition at work; for a hobby; for volunteer work, or simply for a more relaxed lifestyle.

There are registration and exam costs involved. Once you become a chartered member, the membership fee and CPE requirement, while not too costly, is an annual expense. In the good days, getting the CFA can prove that you are committed and that you have sufficient knowledge to perform the tasks.

With an interesting resume and good interview skills, you may be able to break into a front-office investment job. While the economy is recovering, the financial market remains volatile and this poses uncertainty and challenge for professionals to land and keep their jobs. Unless you have something outstanding to convince the interviewer, it is going to be an uphill battle to rely only on the CFA title to get into the industry.

Having said that, for those who like to make long-term plans, getting the CFA designation now adds value down the road when the financial market picks up again. Getting back to the goals of getting the CFA title — most people are aiming for better career prospect and better pay.

In this regard, I would say, in most cases, that only those who are working in the investment industry will find it useful.