Are you satisfied with your job and what are you looking for?

Apparently I was randomly selected from my college to participate in the 2010 National Survey of Recent College Graduates conducted by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in the email it specifies that they cannot substitute another person for me given the process. I was also told that this important national study is the only source of data on the post graduation plans and experiences of recent graduates with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and health fields.

All sounds very interesting. But I want to direct your attention to one of the questions they asked me during the survey:

How much are you satisfied with your current job in the following respective aspects? And also, with a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the importance of each aspect to you?

In case you are one of those debating over several options, I want to list the 9 aspects below and my personal takeaways for each aspect, and to give you an idea of what questions you should ask yourself and your potential future colleagues, before making a decision on joining the firm/or switching to something else.

• Salary
  • An entry level base of 65,000 vs. 70,000 may not be a big difference, but a base of 45,000 vs. 70,000 would much likely raise a bigger question mark.
  • How much is the rough increase every year?
  • What is the industry-level pay for this type of position? Is the pay scale above or below average? How about bonus level?

Move On

Sometimes it is not you who decided to move on. Sometimes you just have to move on, because someone else has been staring at your spot for too long. –thoughts on the competitive job market and career path

What You Need to Know: From Analyst to Associate

There is something you need to understand when you think about moving up the ladder: There is no job that will make you happy 100% of the time, especially at junior level.

A lot of the better paying jobs are intense, demanding, has long hours, and sometimes your coworkers are mean. So what? That is exactly what you signed up for. You need to deal with the pressure, the hard work and all the other mess if you want to move up to the next level. If you can’t, feel free to go somewhere else that does not require you to be good at so many things. And honestly it’s okay too.

But it doesn’t have to be this hard all the time. Attitude is the key and if you always look at things from a positive perspective you can enjoy your work more, and at the same time, gain more respect from other people.

The Shape of Your Career Path

One of our clients asked our portfolio manager in opportunistic strategies during the meeting today: the role of your team, even at junior level, seems to require a lot of complicated skills and experiences, how come you are comfortable hiring fresh grads?

 

Well I would probably answer for him: they’re cheaper to hire and more willing to work long hours…joking, but I was actually delighted to find out how the portfolio manager put his perspective into picture: let’s call it “the shape of your career path”.

 

Which is actually a sandglass.

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When was your defining moment?

BLK President Rob Kapito addressed the Wharton School Class of 2010 at the MBA graduation ceremony on May 16. It was not as funny as Ellen’s, or Blair’s, and I couldn’t stop but thinking: MBA commencement’s so boring…but the major takeaway I had from this speech was when he talked about the “defining moment”.

Ellen’s defining moment was probably when she realized her girlfriend passed away in the car accident and she was living in a basement back then, which made her wonder “why this is happening to me and what does this mean”, and inspired her to create the script on the telephone call with the God. Rob’s defining moment was when his father got seriously sick and he realized he didn’t want his family to go through the same hardship.

Why Don’t YOU Just Do it?

In our Women’s Initiative launch event, our COO mentioned while she was in Boston last week, one of the women in the audience came up to her after the speech and suggested: I’ve noticed we typically have a lot of male speakers in our analyst training classes in the past. As we have quite a few female analysts joining this summer, it might make sense to invite more female speakers to present themselves at the training.

The COO said: it was a great idea. I will definitely communicate this to the representatives in HR who put together the incoming class training. But wait a minute. Why should I be the person doing this? This is YOUR idea so why don’t YOU just do it yourself? Why don’t you get in touch with the people responsible for this directly? Why don’t you provide some ideas and/or topics our female leaders could cover, and you could even be a speaker yourself!

How Much is Too Much – What Not to Overdo in an Interview

Three things could happen during the course of your job search.

1) You get into almost all first-round interviews (you must have a very strong resume) but you don’t land anything for real. 2) You don’t break through to many first-round interviews but you got almost all the offers from those firms you interviewed with(You must be great at interviews). 3) You hardly get interviews and you don’t get offers (er…I’ll leave you alone for now).

Let’s focus on the first scenario. So you have a strong resume, and they would like to know you more. You feel you did a pretty good job at your interview, but what could possible go wrong? 

Don’t Overshare

You can’t imagine how many people don’t know how to answer “tell me about yourself”. This is NOT a question to invite you to elaborate on your life-time stories, how many guys you dated, how your parents divorced when you were nine, or even how you did part-time jobs for all college years to finance your own education (save that for later). It is simply a question of “what are your major skills/qualities that will contribute to this job?” 

Client Communication: Defend Passionately

Defend performance and retain revenue is probably a buy-side problem emerged during the most recent financial crisis. Sell-side has only more explanations to do, but most of their job is done when capital is raised, stock sold, and the merger happened. But as a fiduciary asset manager, you have to engage another step where you have to deal with clients who are unhappy with the performance of their portfolios. 

A Wall Street trader once told me, the investment management industry is the most ridiculous industry of all. Who in the world would give you the money to manage and pay you for doing that, no matter you win or lose? And the next issue raised amid the financial crisis when everything went to shit is the debate on the whole “compared with the benchmark vs. absolute return” idea. If benchmark went down 20%, and you went down 15%, on a relative basis you’re still outperforming but essentially you are losing money for the client. 

But what will piss off a client even more is when they have several external managers, and one of them simply falls behind the other managers, regardless of the market direction. Every client-facing person in the asset management industry would have faced situations where you have to defend your portfolios as well as your firm’s reputation in the past two years. So how exactly do you do that? 

Explain what happened and what went wrong

 

Forget about Goal-setting on Work/Life Balance

When I was still in elementary school, I put down a comprehensive daily schedule on paper on the first day of every summer vacation. I put it up on the wall, my parents were always so impressed with all the detailed items I listed, which included certain time slots for doing homework, reading books, studying English, watching TV, and even taking naps. And then I forgot about it in 2 days. 

The reality is: a lot of people like to plan, but not sticking to their plan. Just think about how many people stick to their New Year resolution just one month into it? 

When I was a  junior at college I went to this information session hosted by one of the famous investment banks. In the Q&A session one of the students asked: What are good questions to ask at an interview?

The Best Career Advice I Ever Received

It was a few years ago. I got this opportunity to sit down with a very senior and successful individual at Wall Street. I asked him one question: I am going to start this new job soon, what advice would you give me? He gave me three, and I have kept them in my heart ever since, and they have never failed me.  

 

Never over-promise and under-deliver

This is the secret of all secrets. People have the tendency to satisfy other people, to meet their needs, to say yes. But people are not good at “managing expectations”. When you get an assignment, the most important question to ask is “when do you need this”? 

Make sure you understand if this is really that urgent, and your boss understands what else is on your plate. If you think you will be able to finish it by the end of the day, say, I should be able to get this to you tomorrow. If you finish it today, great, you’re efficient. If you finish it tomorrow, great, you’re right on time.

What you don’t want to do is promise you can finish it today and end up not making it. 

The “Unfair” Card and How to Use It

It is almost funny how often I hear the phrase “it’s unfair for other people.”

At college, if you want to due your homework late, the professor will tell you “it’s unfair for the other students” in the same class, who may have skipped their friend’s birthday parties over the weekend to finish the paper.

At work, if you don’t copy other members on your team when you send out an email to someone in another group, if anything goes wrong, your manager will tell you “it’s not fair for him/her or anyone else on the team” because they were not involved in the first place and were not able to correct you in a timely manner, and now everyone looks bad in front of some other team.

Then I started to realize how powerful it is to pull the “unfair” card. I was once organizing a group trip to the west coast and someone decided to pull out last minute due to budget concerns. Besides everything else I said, I told him, “this is not fair for everyone else who committed to the trip” and who believed the price will be at $XX for the hotel, now with you not going, everyone else will have to pay extra.

He ended up going of course, and he had a blast.

P.S. I tried pulling the card myself from time to time and it usually works really well. If you never used this before, try it, and let me know what you think! 🙂