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Wiley or Gleim which one is better?
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Rising Star
Most larger shops have this type of structure. I left b4 as a manager and was hired as a senior accountant. My shop told me they don’t hire more than 5 years out of public
Staff accountant -> senior accountant -> fund manager -> assistant controller -> controller -> senior controller -> CFO
Rising Star
Eventually CFO of fund if you make it that far. It depends on your landing spot.
-does your landing spot promote people internally or will you need to stay 3-5 years and then jump ship to get your promotion?
-are you headed towards the big funds (Carlyle, apollo, etc) where it’s another pyramid like big 4? Can stay a couple years get promoted and then jump like you are doing now.
-are you going to no-name shop where promotion isn’t really a thing? Could stay there forever if that’s what you want
Rising Star
Largely depends at the group. Apollo was a potential landing spot as well. As far as I am aware (which is like “I heard from a friend of a friend” level of reliableness) 10pm or later every night but no weekends. They work a lot. A ton of reward following apollo tho. (Like exciting for 2 levels up at a smaller shop elsewhere, and almost every fund is smaller than apollo so you have some good choices).
Had a former manager when I was a staff 2 boomerang back from apollo. He said when he was there the culture was horrible but since having left it improved immensely and highly recommended I work in a specific group but not all of apollo.
I can’t offer you a tremendous amount of knowledge since I only spent a year as a fund accountant, but I’ll do my best in saying some places pay better than others, and from my perspective it’s worth much more to work in-house rather than a shop. I worked on my former employer’s largest PE client (funds as large as 12bn in commitments) and that made no impact on bonus or salary. I was paid the same as any individual on another client’s fund who spent 75% of the day watching YouTube. Promotions aren’t guaranteed and my shop was at the bottom of the market in terms of compensation. I ended up leaving for industry to a 25% raise plus 8% bonus in the same geographic area. I’m also working towards a CPA which is not valued at all in that particular company.
As mentioned, promotion can be difficult, and my workplace almost always hired outside for director level and above. The progression there was analyst -> senior analyst -> supervisor -> manager -> director. Most people there got stuck at manager with no promise of further promotion. My FIL makes 170K+ bonus where he works (large bank) but he had to secure competing offers to get to that number. Layoffs are part of the culture there.
I don’t mean to be so pessimistic though. You can make a lot of money in that field and my experience is one that only held a little over a year of experience.
What Manager 1 described is pretty accurate in describing some of the things myself and my team were responsible for. Tracking the LOC, LOC wires, cash reconciliations, investment holdings reports, monthly soft closes, booking new deals, quarterly NAV packages, fund flows, and financial statement preparation are some of the tasks I often did where I worked. Workload was heavily dependent on the client. My employer paid us hourly and was very strict about OT, so it was the exempt employees who ended up taking up any additional workload the analysts had not completed by EOD. A lot of it is as simple as running reports from software like Investran and Geneva, but some of it is very tedious work.