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Career shift

Mark Lopenz

Joined
2/14/12
Messages
3
Points
13
Hello everyone,

I intend to shift my career into a more quantitative direction. However, my situation is the following:
- 32 y old from Switzerland
- already earned an Master in Banking & Finance (but not highly quantitative)
- Consultant for Basel II but also not highly quantitative
- Generally: My own self-assessment is that my current quant-skills are on a low/medium level (for a pure quant job)

My current strategy is the following:
- Doing a Graduate Diploma in Mathematics at LSE (part-time ) - hope within 1- 1.5y
- Followed by a MFE Programm

However, a you can see I will be around 35 or so until I would be ready for the market - is there a real chance to get a quant job in this situation?

Thanks for your input & regards,
Mark
 
Is your goal to land a quant job in Switzerland? If you have / manage to obtain some programming skills (SQL, VBA, OO Language) then you should be fine. There are many jobs in Risk Management where you could highly leverage your knowledge in the Basel II area.

I always ask this but are you aware that most (if not all) quant jobs require getting your hands dirty with crunching loads of data? Does it excite you to query data sets? Do you get satisfaction from coding/testing/debugging? If you can answer these questions with yes => good!

Quant is 70%-90% a programmer, 10%-30% modeler
 
Thanks for your reply. Yes, my goal is to stay in Switzerland or Germany and I have a strong programming affinty.

I am just insecured with respect to my age.
 
Age is no issue! And also I don't think that you need any further education. Just have a go at it and apply for some positions you find interesting. In this way you will quickly see what your market value is.
 
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