When investment banking jobs lead to a dead end

The following is an excerpt from a Yahoo! Finance Singapore article that is citing a study co-authored by Finance Professor Shane Corwin on “The Changing Nature of Investment Banking Relationships”.

To read the entire Yahoo! Finance article visit: When investment banking jobs lead to a dead end

If you want to work a 40 hour week, investment banking is not the place to do it. One junior investment banker got in touch with us via Twitter to say he’s usually done 40 hours by Tuesday – or maybe Wednesday. “I normally hit 40 hours by late on Tuesday,” he claimed – before admitting that he was exaggerating (slightly): “I work a 15-17 hour day on average, so maybe Tuesday was an exaggeration. But I usually work an 80-90 hour week if you include weekends and I haven’t had a summer holiday for the past two years because we were executing transactions.”

Welcome to the life of the junior investment banker – a creature for whom work is almost everything. Unsurprisingly, many junior bankers burn out or simply quit banking altogether. Those who don’t aspire to the next level, but opportunities to move onwards and upwards are disappearing – especially if you work in M&A at a big bank. And the lack of opportunities is causing tension internally.

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DCM bankers’ desirability was underscored by a recent study from academics at the University of Notre Dame. After studying 20,000 M&A transactions and public and private security issues by U.S. firms between 1996 and 2009, the academics came to the conclusion that relationships between banks and clients were weakest in M&A, and strongest in ECM and DCM.

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