Introduction
The industry of finance offers a huge number of options for the upcoming professionals who can easily exploit their potential and make the most from their skills, choosing what suits according to their interest too. Corporate environment though seems ambiguous and challenging but a good initiate and deep understanding of networks can bring an individual to a position where he can introduce dramatic increases to the value of a company and reduce corporate risks with good knowledge of techniques, derivatives, and models (Sapienza et al, 2009). By knowing the attractive features of a position and analyzing the business thoroughly, he can help the company reaching good position in a highly competitive market.
Corporate Finance as a Financial Career
The job of corporate finance and thus career path is compatible with the interest and skills of those who can easily work for a company to help it find and manage the capital needs, which are necessary for the running of a company. While working on a capital a professional is also responsible for controlling the risk related to finance and increase the corporate value (Bertrand et al, 2009). Moreover, the person responsible for corporate finance performs extremely important functions such as establishing a financial strategy, setting up financial statements, coordinating with auditors, and making forecasts of profits and losses. Corporate finance job is itself a very wide job in which person is responsible for various different features such as arranging mergers and acquisition activities, performing internal audit, doing financial analysis, and holding treasury department. As a result, a person holding such position becomes such valuable for the company that most of the success of a company deems to be in his hand. This financial career option proves very attractive as such, managers help the business to grow and raise capital by looking at different lines of credit and move ahead for expansion. The corporate finance as a career option has everything that adds value to the company from engaging in financial resources’ allocation in the most effective manner to sorting out the financial problems by investment analysis and capital budgeting (Baker & Wurgler, 2011). By realizing the financial needs, a manager advises the company to go for the most appropriate type of capital (debt, equity, or preferred stock) that best suits the current and future needs. Such option helps to create the shareholder wealth and adds value to the company by letting know the uncertainty, level of flexibility in project valuation, with management of working capital. It associates with the transactions that gear up the capital needs through which business creates, prospers, grows, and moves towards further expansion.
Skills Required
Skills that are required for corporate finance job vary according to the type of company an individual is joins. A person holding such a position should be good at analytics, should have problem solving ability, understand a changing environment, should be good at dealing with numbers, should be skilled at financial planning with the knowledge of capital raising and accounting.
Hedging as a Finance Career
Financial career always attracts individuals to opt for the job position and go for the area, which is itself a complete package in which individual becomes responsible for very important areas of business. The job of hedging is one such career option for finance specialist that allows him to act as a financial analyst and trader. This job involves a person to go in depth and help the company in complying with regulations. Hedging involves a selling and buying of various types of financial products and assets and doing their marketing and setting up an effective and attractive portfolio of a company (Hankins, 2011). The best thing is that each option is itself so broad and divided in to various job offers. The job of hedging is also divided in to hedge fund trader, hedge fund financial analyst, marketing manager, quantitative analyst, and hedge fund portfolio manager. As a result, one chooses to apply for the position that suits his interest, skills, and need.
Skills Required
Any of the above-mentioned position for hedging requires an individual to have a very in-depth and good knowledge of a market and instruments of the investors so that an investment process is done successfully. Position holder should also have the skill of evaluating the risks involved in operations and overall investment funds. Moreover, the knowledge about the financial statistics, ability of setting up effective strategies of portfolio construction, and keeping the balanced risks and return profile are one of the most important skills required to increase the net performance and successful accomplishment of duties of hedging job.
Hedge fund jobs are getting good value and importance in the industry as the new challenges emerging, maximizing, and creating the demands of such traders. The requirement to understand growing technologies, market structure, business needs, and features ensure the hedge fund manager to play with multiple instruments and their trading.
Recommendation
The environment of today is getting competitive day by day for the job seekers. Choosing a career path is never an easy decision for the people who have acquired education in finance. Both the above-mentioned career paths are exceptional in their own. In order to accomplish financial career goals one needs to endure various sacrifices. Corporate finance job payoff highly lucratively. Requiring your brain game and math skills and abilities it is highly prestigious and challenging as compare to hedging work, which should not be de graded too. Corporate finance job is also important from the point of view that one is able to perform hedging more effectively if he has an investment banking or corporate finance experience (but that is not true always). Corporate finance career is said to be very brutal as it leads the employees to work a lot as compare to in hedging but corporate finance involves lots of money for the employee too. This means that his longer hours sacrifice is compensated by the good amount of earnings. In addition to that, skills required in hedging are very specific. On the other hand, corporate finance skills are easy to transfer in any other job when one plans to exit the current job, having very general skills that an employee can easily transfer. As a result, the corporate finance path is more suitable from various points but the selection depends upon what one enjoys the most. If one has an interest of finance then either way is probably right as both involve money management.
References
Baker, M., & Wurgler, J. (2011). Behavioral corporate finance: An updated survey (No. w17333). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Bertrand, M., Goldin, C., & Katz, L. F. (2009). Dynamics of the gender gap for young professionals in the corporate and financial sectors (No. w14681). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hankins, K. W. (2011). How do financial firms manage risk? Unraveling the interaction of financial and operational hedging. Management Science, 57(12), 2197-2212.
Sapienza, P., Zingales, L., & Maestripieri, D. (2009). Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(36), 15268-15273.
