I am a professional engineer trying to find my way into the world of finance and investing. I have been in the engineering profession for 10+ years now but has always had the lingering feeling that there is something else out there that would stoke my fire more than cranking out engineering calculations and drawings. It has taken me a while to pinpoint what was lacking in my professional career. Over the past year, I’ve made a point to dedicate the time to find out what I truly wanted to do with my career. As I looked back on the times I felt fully engaged at work, I started to notice an overarching theme. I noticed that I really enjoyed the opportunities in which I was involved in company wide strategic projects and discussions that required an understanding of the entire organization instead of just a single department. These problems are uniquely challenging in that it is imperative to understand how a particular decision and initiative will affect every entity along the company food chain.
Where to go from here?
This realization naturally led to the conclusion that I would like to pursue a business management related career path as opposed to the narrowly focused technical career path of engineering. However, much like engineering, the world of business management is made up of multiple disciplines such as marketing, finance, accounting, operations, etc. And like engineering, each discipline is unique in its own way, and requires a slightly different skillsets. As one could imagine, with a engineering background, I am a bit of a numbers geek and enjoy tackling problems where you can back up your result with numbers and data. I felt that the discipline that aligned the closest to my skillset was finance. Finance to me feels like it could be more of a career pivot, as opposed to a full career transition that would enable me to utilize the skills that I have acquired over my 10+ year engineering career. However, instead of applying that technical skillset to a focused engineering problem, you get to apply it to problems and scenarios that affect businesses as a whole.
Time to be a sponge!
Once I decided to focus on fully vetting finance as a potential career path, I set out to learn as much as I could about finance. I first started by listening to freely available finance class lectures online offered by select Universities. The 3 resources that I found had the best foundational information in a structured educational setting were Aswath Damodaran’s website (https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar), Open Yale (https://oyc.yale.edu/), and MIT Open Courseware (https://ocw.mit.edu/). My current commute to work is about an hour and I found that time to be an ideal setting for listening to lecture after lecture. Through these websites, I was able to virtually sit in on courses ranging from Financial Theory to Foundations of Finance to Investment Philosophies.
After a few months of watching the free online resources from Yale, NYU, and MIT, I decided it was time to find something that would allow me to get some hands-on experience with what I was learning from the lectures. Another aspect of pursuing hands-on experience was to learn more about how finance was practiced in the real-world day to day operations of business and investments. It didn’t take long before I stumbled upon a website called Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) (https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com). CFI provides fully online courses and career certifications centered around Finance, Investing, and Banking. It was the perfect solution for what I was trying to accomplish. CFI was one of the most budget friendly options that I came across (if not the most budget friendly). They currently offer 5 certification programs for people interesting in learning skills ranging from financial modeling and valuation to business intelligence and data analysis. For myself, I ended up landing on the Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst certification (FMVA™). The FMVA™ certification program offers Prep, Core, and Elective courses ranging from Corporate Finance Fundamentals to Business Valuation Modeling to Leveraged Buyout (LBO) Modeling. I started my first CFI course at the beginning of July 2022 and passed the final exam to complete my certification at the end of October. CFI has been an excellent resource and I plan to continue using it as they are always releasing new courses and material.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
One of the common threads through all the resources I have used to learn the basics of finance and valuation, is that the skills associated with all aspects of finance need to be consistently practiced over time and situations to truly become a successful practitioner. Which leads me to my personal reasoning for starting this blog. I hope to utilize this blog as a means of putting the stuff I have learned over the past year into practice. The CFI courses also opened my eyes to the breadth of industry segments within the general field of Finance, everything from investment banking to private equity to corporate development. The industry that currently piques my interest the most is Private Equity and Venture Capital. However, I know it is a highly competitive industry and is nearly impossible to break into without a top tier pedigree and/or experience. I’m not sure where exactly this blog is going to take me but I’m excited to embark on this journey. I know I will learn a lot through this process and I also look forward to learning from anyone that happens to reach out to me along the way. Let’s get started!
