Newly minted university graduates who have landed coveted jobs on Wall Street may have impressive resumes and sought-after references. Often, though, nuts-and-bolts skills like spreadsheet building and database extraction are not part of university curriculums.
When millions of dollars can be won or lost on one calculation, firms are finding it essential that their new hires can tell the difference between a pivot table and a header row.
Enter specialized boot camps where — for fees that sometimes exceed $1,000 a day — would-be masters of the universe can perfect Excel modeling techniques and financial analysis. Each year, tens of thousands of students at the nation’s top business schools, and scores of new hires at financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group, now take courses run by companies like Training the Street and Wall Street Prep.
Graduates say the classes give them a new appreciation for the heart of financial analysis. An eight-hour crash course on leveraged buyouts from Training the Street was so intensive that it “kind of makes you want to slit your wrists,” said Michael Rojas, who graduated from Columbia Business School this month.
Overall, though, Rojas said he found the training to be thorough. “This is the stuff you really need to know, and that you don’t learn in business school,” he said. “They have a template model, and they walk you through page by page.”
The growing ranks in boot camps underscore a little-noticed trend by Wall Street banks and other financial firms to outsource technical training. Such knowledge is crucial to carrying out the daily tasks of many disciplines on Wall Street — whether it is the merger deal-making, bond trading or sell-side analysis. “I just want someone who can really use Excel and PowerPoint,” said one senior loan syndication banker at a European bank, describing his recent interviews of newly minted MBAs in New York.
Nineteen of the country’s top 20 business schools now use Training the Street to teach an estimated 20,000 business majors every year in how to interpret financial statements, value corporations and run spreadsheet analyses.
“A lot of investment banks are casting a wider net, so they’re spending more time emphasizing getting people up to speed fast,” said Matan Feldman, who founded Wall Street Prep in 2003 after working as an analyst and associate at JPMorgan Chase. Because of the camps, “you don’t have as many clueless liberal arts majors anymore,” Feldman said.
Even the banks themselves send legions of their young hires for training. Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, and others have hired Training the Street to school summer interns on credit analysis and mergers and acquisitions.
Such fundamentals also are valuable outside of Wall Street in businesses such as brand management and to technology companies in Silicon Valley that do financial modeling, said Missy Bailey, senior associate director of MBA career services at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
The training, however, does not come cheap. Business schools pay Training the Street as much as $1,300 a student for a course. Wall Street Prep, also used by most top business schools and more than 150 banks and financial firms, charges corporate clients as much as $1,499 per student for a three-day course.
These programs are also courting ever-younger students — and their parents’ wallets. In June, Training the Street will start a four-day Undergraduate Wall Street Boot Camp in New York and will charge students $3,000 (not including accommodations) to learn the basics of financial modeling, valuation, and analysis.
With a hiring downturn on Wall Street, where the number of securities and commodities jobs had declined by 30 percent to just under 170,000 since the peak in 2000, students say the courses are a practical necessity.
As boot camp training becomes more common, a saturation effect could occur. If everyone is taking classes like Excel Best Practices and Restructuring Modeling, doing so may not make one candidate stand out in job interviews.
But Wesley Hansen said such a course was vital when he switched to a career in finance. He was a camera operator on reality shows before graduating last year from the Marshall School of Business.
“I had no clue how to use Excel, so it helped me get a job, no doubt,” said Hansen, who is now an equity analyst in California with a brokerage firm.