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What does the typical day of an investment banker entail?

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Original post by BizzStrut
I wonder whether these soft skills would be more quickly developed in, say, a sales environment where you're trained and taught people-oriented skills then tested by fire (commission based on sales) for a 3 month stint and/or as a management consultant where you have exposure to executives, CEOs, and spend a lot of time presenting.


In my opinion, Sales is not political in the same way that banking or any other corporate job is. If you hit your sales target then you're good to go.

Arguably, in Consulting you do not get any more/less exposure to senior people than you would in banking. It's not common for a junior consultant to go round meeting executives and the CEO etc. Just replace Excel with Powerpoint. From my experience though, at least, consulting is an incredibly political career path. You really have to rely very heavily on your network within the firm to succeed (get the good assignments, good projects, good roles, not be on the bench, get promoted, make what you're doing look good, get people on your side, do loads of internal extracurricular stuff etc). For Consulting, you can have an army of stakeholders (both internally and especially at the client) to win over, and this can make it very difficult. You do not have this in Sales.

I think banking/consulting have similar offerings in terms of soft skills, probably more so in consulting. Banking has a good balance of hard/soft skill development.

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Original post by Princepieman
Don't forget the hardcore repetition that ingrains your modelling and analysis skills to insane levels.

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For sure, you will become a monster with Excel, PowerPoint and destroying financial statements quickly. Resilience is another key soft skill you develop.

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Original post by Commercial Paper
In my opinion, Sales is not political in the same way that banking or any other corporate job is. If you hit your sales target then you're good to go.

Arguably, in Consulting you do not get any more/less exposure to senior people than you would in banking. It's not common for a junior consultant to go round meeting executives and the CEO etc. Just replace Excel with Powerpoint. From my experience though, at least, consulting is an incredibly political career path. You really have to rely very heavily on your network within the firm to succeed (get the good assignments, good projects, good roles, not be on the bench, get promoted, make what you're doing look good, get people on your side, do loads of internal extracurricular stuff etc). For Consulting, you can have an army of stakeholders (both internally and especially at the client) to win over, and this can make it very difficult. You do not have this in Sales.

I think banking/consulting have similar offerings in terms of soft skills, probably more so in consulting. Banking has a good balance of hard/soft skill development.

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Hmm, okay. I see what you mean. In something like auto sales (what I'm doing now), it's just about you, your sales and your hustle. It's the closest thing I can imagine to being self-employed while under management - We're basically just using the brand name of the company to get people to the door. With B2B I figured it'd be a little different with a more 'corporate' culture. Especially with the traditional path of sales guys into C-suit until more recently (mainly down to lack of technical knowledge, I'm told), it looked like a similar kind of skill set. Lack of experience talking.

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