Useful bschool programs for PE
Hi everyone,
First post here after lurking for a while. Currently weighing my options for a good business education now that I've made it into PE and just wanted some opinions.
A bit about my background first. Graduated a couple years back with a degree in science and went into education before deciding to quit and get myself into finance. Managed to pass the CFA level 3 in 2018 before quitting last year and I managed to land myself into a small PE shop in Singapore.
After starting my job, I realized that I'm still lacking a lot in knowledge and skills which I hope to compensate for somehow. Unfortunately my firm isn't able to offer me much in terms of training because there's just 4 of us here so I'll need to pick up the slack on my own. Good thing here however, is that my working hours are pretty short (45 hours/week including lunch) and I don't work weekends or evenings.
Given my working hours, I'm in a position to look into taking part-time/online programs but I'm not sure what would be more useful in my case right now. Would I be better served to take an MFin program or should I try for an MBA right off the bat?
Sounds like you have a good lifestyle role. What type of investments do you guys look at?
Yes, this is one of the downsides of joining a small PE shop. It's all on the job learning with limited (if any) training.
An MBA would probably provide a more rounded education set if you are interested in buyout.
We do both growth and VC within the region but not really buyouts although we did consider one last year.
Would an MBA be equally useful if I stay in my role?
I suggested an MBA from a knowledge building point of view. So any online MBA that is descent would do.
If you want it to help with a future job then you may need to think about doing an MBA with a brand.
INSEAD seems like solid choice since you’re in Singapore
I considered that but its expensive and there's no part-time option which I prefer because I really want to stay with my firm at least for the next 2-3 years.
Fair enough. Think its around $90k - but it’ll likely come with an excellent network (which wouldnt be the case for online degrees). Alumni seem to do be doing quite well, judging from a quick LinkedIn search.
Are you looking purely for an education or are you trying to unlock a new network? If you intend on staying at your firm and you're just trying to get more knowledgable, then I wouldn't even suggest going to school.
Priority for now is knowledge certainly. I think being able to do my job well is more important than the network at least for now.
That being said, if going to school gets me both, I would be happy to go because I don't think I'll stay at my firm forever.
If you want to learn, there's a lot that you can do through inexpensive courses and classes online. There's no reason to blow away tens of thousands of dollars in my opinion. As for the network, generally speaking, you can only fully take advantage of that if you go full-time and in person.
I did look through online courses but my consideration was that many of these don't really allow for classroom discussions which I find particularly useful for knowledge building (might be biased as an ex-teacher) especially for the "softer" parts of business knowledge.
If you do have specific recommendations on courses/books that can help me with that, I'll be grateful definitely.
If you want to discuss things, it's sites like this that allow you to do this. There are Slack channels and Discord servers and subreddits where people are discussing anything and everything you might be interested in (and of course WSO).
What specifically are you trying to learn? As per your OP, you've passed CFA level 3 so you've already absorbed a lot of information, so it's going to have to be specific niches of information.
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