A few thoughts come to mind when regarding the job market, prospects, and this story with the sandwich board:
I too am an undergraduate of a reputable school. I currently am also unemployed and although I was able to get two job offers earlier this year, they are not in the same line of work like banks, and ultimately I was unable to take up those offers because of personal situations prohibiting me from working. However, it took me quite a bit of legwork to even get that.
As you progress in age and experience, it becomes increasingly important to make yourself somehow irreplaceable to the company. You can accomplish that through either promotions and high titles which would have your company and the market perceive you to be an expert in the field, or you can accomplish this through graduate degrees (preferably professional) or licenses and certifications.
I really sympathize with this person. I can go ahead right now and send my resume out to all the companies on monster, careerbuilder and hotjobs that would look for a financial analyst (my most relevant job title at this stage in my career) and I know that I would receive a call or email back in about 1 out of 30 ads I reply to, if that.
I consider myself to have pretty good experience, the right education and name brand. However, what doesn't work for me is that I neither have a professional graduate degree nor something like a CPA of CFA.
I know that given one or more of these, my chances of employment, and my stability within the corporate organization would improve multi-fold.
After a certain point, a company starts looking at a person as either just 1) really competent regardless of where he/she went to school or what licenses he/she holds or 2) really competent because of the extra schooling/training he/she got such as an MBA or the licenses/certifications. That has been my experience.
Judging from this person in the article, it seems as if he is either an
MIT undergrad or an
MIT post grad in a hard science. If he was an Sloan MBA, I would believe he would not be in the situation he is currently facing.
That is really disappointing to know considering what a lottery like situation it is to get acceptance into a school like
MIT, undergrad or grad.
This all being said, I believe that with MFE's, it's going to become inevitable that if trading becomes increasingly programmed, and the world will lean to having equations spit out trading decisions as opposed to human discretion, these programs will become devalued. That is just my humble thought as systems are supposed to take the guesswork out of reacting to human emotions used in trading decisions. When you have a bunch of programs all designed to do the same thing by people who got the same education, then the profit opportunity becomes minimized imo.
But of course, since banks seem to think this is the way to go, and it makes their business more justifiable, I really can't see MFE's to be hurting for work. I think they would just have to be willing to do other things than just work in the front office where the real money is. Then again, you also have your commercial banks, insurance companies, and large asset managers who are also going to need people adept at computer engineering and math.
Compared to a guy that just knows spreadsheet valuation work, that stuff is rocket science. If GS won't snap up an MFE grad there has to be a ton of other non-banking, regular industry companies looking to find guys like that to work in their financial controls or risk management.
I believe the MFE degree will be perceived more and more as a generalist degree going down the line as regular finance becomes automated. Look at any company nowadays and you have a bunch of programs designed by finance and computer geeks that design macros programs to run a simple variance calculation of this months actuals versus the forecast you made last month. Even the forecasts can be automated.
It no longer makes sense to just learn the principles of corporate finance and accounting and expect to be useful to even a regular company.
That is really my "hedge reason" to get the MFE because I know that companies are going to desire the quant and computer knowledge these grads have. Of course, I really want to work in the front office as a trader, but I have to be realistic. There will always be room for the top 20 MBA grads who will be groomed to be upper management types. But if you're known as a hards skills guy, ie an Asian guy like me who gets called from recruiters all the time because I indicated I have some ERP systems experience as an enduser on my resume and now people expect me to be a IT guy or implementer, just having a regular finance degree and expecting to contribute to the company becomes more and more of an anachronistic proposition considering the progression of the times and technology. The MFE should be a big buffer against this. Or so I hope.
