Best of 2014: Career Insights

In 2014, CFA Institute has aimed to be more consistent and explicit in addressing career management topics on Enterprising Investor. Many of our authors have contributed posts that have directly tackled career management and job search themes as well as leadership, communications, and management skills topics in such a way that it only requires a modest expansion of thought to apply the main points to your active career management efforts. In this season of Best of 2014 selections, I decided to highlight five of these contributions in case you missed them along the way.

• Six Networking Lessons to Remember: Charlie Henneman, CFA, recounts six formative lessons he has learned about networking over the course of his career. There is simply no way to overstate the importance of networking as a career management strategy because, as Charlie points out quite eloquently, “successful careers usually boil down to complex human relationships, which in turn require varying degrees of etiquette, effort, respect, and trust to cultivate and maintain.”
• A Little Industry Experience May Make You a Better Analyst: David Larrabee, CFA, examines the findings of a study by finance professors Daniel Bradley, Sinan Gokkaya, and Xi Liu that suggests that “an analyst with prior industry experience [is] more likely to be on target with his earnings forecasts and stand a better chance of being named to Institutional Investor magazine’s All-America Research Team . . . ”
• Skills that Separate You as an Investment Manager: Introspection: Jason Voss, CFA, explains the role that introspection and self-knowledge plays in the career of an investment manager and offers a strategy — meditation — for developing the skill. Voss writes, “if you do not know yourself, then your intellectual tools are likely to be out of accord with your innate talents.” This important observation has ramifications at every level when it comes to your career.
• Skills that Separate You as an Investment Manager: Forthrightness: Voss considers forthrightness and how to cultivate it. He offers as an example of its application a personal  job interviewing experience that demonstrates well what being authentic and confident in an interview can be like.
• Women’s Work: Getting Ahead Despite Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs, and Leaky Pipelines: I don’t know about you, but in 2014, I noticed a marked uptick in the number of blogs, articles, tweets, and other references to the matter — I might even say problem — of the relatively low percentage of women in finance, and in top roles in finance, in particular. Lauren Foster explores some of the issues at play regarding the dearth of woman in top leadership positions while introducing some of the leading figures discussing the topic these days. Best of all, Lauren has compiled in this post several additional resources for considering the topic further.

I hope that this reflection of some of the career management themed posts on Enterprising Investor in 2014 sparks your own reflection on your career highlights from the past year and perhaps encourages you to think about your career goals for 2015. Please feel free to use the comments section to share with us any career management topics you would like to see our authors explore that might help you think about and achieve your goals.

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.