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Fresh graduates are looking to get that competitive edge in a bid to bypass junior entry levels in the finance industry

INTENSE COMPETITION and the desire to get ahead mean professional training courses are in high demand in the finance industry.

May Ng, programme director of the Financial Career Institute, said demand was high for the centre's professional banking courses, and that people were starting to get qualified earlier in their careers.

Run by S C Learning, a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank (HK), the Financial Career Institute specialises in professional education for people working in the banking and finance industry.

Ms Ng said the institute's students generally fell into three categories: banking professionals who wanted to move up; professionals from outside the industry who wanted to move in; and ambitious fresh graduates who wanted to give their banking careers a head start.

Many of the professionals from inside the industry were either looking to move into a position with greater responsibility or make a horizontal move into a different part of the business.

'There are many different roles within the banking industry,' she said. 'Many aspire to be a banking manager. The most popular sectors are to be a personal financial consultant, a customer relationship manager or a relationship manager in corporate finance.'

The motivation for people coming into the industry to take the courses is to make sure they can keep their seniority.

'These are mostly junior or middle managers; they don't want to go back to the bottom,' Ms Ng said. 'Experience in another industry can still be useful in banking, so it is not a complete waste. The only thing they need to enhance is their technical knowledge.'

Fresh graduates, meanwhile, are looking for a way to leapfrog junior levels to begin their careers at a higher level.

'They are really looking to get that competitive edge,' Ms Ng said. 'This is part of a new trend we have seen emerging. People are becoming much more advanced in plotting their career paths - even before they graduate.'

Top banking positions required professional qualifications, she said, and a growing number of undergraduates were jumping the gun, studying for theirs at the same time as working on their degrees.

'They study our courses part time at the same time as studying full time at university, similar to our professional students who also have full-time jobs,' she said. 'They really want to get ahead.'

Ms Ng said the institute had to take the students' heavy workloads into account when designing its courses.

'We try not to have a lot of heavy assignments for our part-time students,' Ms Ng said. 'We focus on simulating a real working environment.'

While she said the course was 'not very technical' in nature and homework was relatively light, work in class was  intensive.

'In the classroom, it is quite demanding. The students have to participate a lot.'

The institute often used multimedia teaching methods or brought in banking practitioners to create a greater degree of realism.

To qualify as a personal finance consultant took 148 hours of class time, she said. Becoming a relationship manager in corporate finance took 142 hours, and becoming a customer relationship manager took just 76. Fees for the three part-time courses, which generally take four to six months to complete, are $21,000, $43,000 and $24,800, respectively.

Ms Ng said she would expect students to reap that investment back relatively quickly. 'I'm sure [salaries are] positively proportionate to what you know and what you can output.'



Professional banking courses in big demand