I'm studying for my CFA but getting recruitment letters for financial palnner?

No, listen to them. "Financial Planners" are just sales people that may or may not have much financial experience at all. It is not a gateway into the financial world at all, it is pretty separate. It's selling people sh*tty annuities and shifting around their funds in order to generate transaction and management fees. I obviously have a pretty negative view of these twigs and for good reason. Not saying they're all bad, but if you really want to be a top earner, you have to become a sh*tty person unfortunately. You have to sell people a dream that you can beat the stock market, when 1) you really can't, 2) you're not even doing the analysis work, just selling and getting new clients. But really, it's up to you. Are you very outgoing and great at networking? FP might be up your alley. Do you like doing analysis and are more introverted? FA is up your alley.

As to your other questions, I just made a long post to another person inquiring, here it is:

"Ok, I've been doing research on FA positions since starting my MBA program. I have a friend that got an internal FA job right out of undergrad pre-recession and in a city of 200k. I am now in a city of 100k and it is very tough to find such positions (internal FA) even posted. Anyway, here is what I have learned.

1) FA is actually a broad term for 2 very different positions. The first deals with analyzing securities. The second deals with analyzing a company's internal numbers and reporting to a CFO, manager, or other higher up. If you want to be a security analyst, you should plan to move to a large city. I'm not sure about Detroit, but I'm sure Chicago would have these jobs. I know where I live, I'd have to move to Charlotte to get such a job. NYC is obviously the mecca for these. The internal accounting analyst can be found all over the place.

2) If you want to become a security analyst, an MBA in finance is a great start. Second, you could start studying for the CFA exam and include this on your resume as auto-resume screening programs will look for this and it will help you get interviews. You could also get a job right now as a lower end analyst, such as a credit or risk analyst, which can be found in any city, to help you on the resume.

3) If you want to become an internal analyst, you should look to study accounting, rather than finance. You could do an MBA in accounting, which should also get you enough hours to sit for the CPA later on. You could also do a straight MaCC program. In the meantime, get a straight accounting job if you can't get a FA job right away.

As for competition, I'm not certain as to security analysts. My guess would be yes, they are quite competitive and a lot of smart people are going after them. For internal analysts, I would say less so, because many large companies and factories have FAs on staff, so I would guess there are more internal analyst jobs out there. There are only so many security analysts needed really, but they should pay quite handsomely.

The last consideration is work-life balance. This, along with city flexibility, is the main reason I wanted to do internal analysis. Internal hours are pretty standard. Security analyst hours can be quite high, especially if you end up on WS, Chicago, Charlotte, etc major financial centers. The unfortunate side to WS is that by the time you figure hours worked and cost of living, your true hourly rate is near that of a server. Obviously the upside is if you work hard for 10-15 years you can make serious bank down the road. It's all about what you want out of life and your career.

Hope this helps."

DEFINITELY A BIG FRAUD! Me too, got the same email letter. Hope the British government would find ways to STOP such scam as this would affect their credibility and to protect the welfare of their country as a whole.....

dwedwez