How to Write an Investment Banking Resume When You Have No Real Work Experience
“Ok, I’ve followed your resume templates, but I don’t have any real work experience and I’m applying to internships… what do I do?
How do I compete with the guy who already has finance internships on his resume?“
This one is very common if you’re still in school and you’re going for internships or even full-time offers.
And it applies even if you’re more experienced – but you don’t have much in the way of finance experience.
So here’s how you spin your resume to win investment banking interviews – even if you don’t have much “real” work experience.
Wait, Resumes Still Matter?
You might be wondering why this matters at all: doesn’t networking trump polishing your resume?
Yes, any day of the week. And spending dozens of hours “perfecting” your resume is still a waste of time.
But you still need a solid – if not perfect – resume. That’s especially true if you’re not coming from a well-known school and you don’t have brand-name internships.
And if you use cold-calling or cold-emailing to contact banks, they will judge you heavily based on your resume – so it needs to be good.
The Tutorial
To make all of this more concrete, we’re going to do a “resume makeover” and show you exactly how to change this university student’s resume to make it far more effective.
You can watch the video tutorial and review the Before and After files below:
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The resume itself:
And here’s the text version:
Key Mistakes
This resume is certainly not “terrible” – but there is one big problem:
Nothing on here indicates any interest in finance or desire to do a finance internship.
What’s wrong specifically?
- He lists too much experience, and most of it isn’t relevant. 2-3 solid entries is far better than 6 thin experiences.
- He does not highlight what’s most relevant to finance here, and instead treats everything as equal.
- He fails to list a highly relevant entry that should be counted as “work experience” rather than an “activity” at the bottom.
- He’s not specific enough with the finance-related experience.
So how do we fix all that?
Magnify Tiny But Relevant Experiences
Repeat after me: relevance trumps time when it comes to work experience.
If you’ve spent 2-3 years working at the doctor’s office or student center part-time, that’s nice – but it’s also useless for investment banking.
This student should focus on just 2 experiences:
- JP Morgan Investment Banking Case Competition
- Investment Fund
And then he can briefly write about his retail job over the summer and the student newspaper.
Unlike the others, the retail job is “real” work experience, in an actual workplace – which shows banks that you’re capable of functioning in the real world.
Right now this student barely mentions #1 and #2 above, but he should expand on both and pretend they’re work experience.
Even if the case competition only lasted a week, you need to draw attention to it because of the brand-name and because it’s more relevant than anything else on there.
Turn Your Hobbies and Clubs Into “Work Experience”
Examples of hobbies, clubs, and activities you could turn into “work experience”:
- Day Trading / Your Personal Portfolio (works better for Sales & Trading)
- Professional Organizations (e.g. Society of Securities Analysts)
- Finance Website You Started
- Case or Investment Competitions
- Student-Run Investment Funds or Finance / Consulting Clubs
What if you’ve racked your brain and you really can’t think of anything that seems remotely related to finance?
Your best bet is to re-position some of your experience as “consulting,” emphasizing the recommendations you made and the results rather than the technical details.
Remember, anything could be called “consulting” – and if you never had a formal title, all the better. More on that one here.
Cut Out “Work Experience” If It Won’t Impress
Forget about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: there’s no “law” that you have to list every last detail on your resume, and most of the time you shouldn’t.
What should you cut?
- Part-time experience at the library, student center, etc.
- Retail/restaurant work.
- Anything you’re listing just to make a “laundry list” of activities – move this to the bottom instead.
- Anything over a year old that’s not relevant.
One exception: you may want to leave on retail/restaurant-type work experience if that’s all you have aside from activities – don’t focus on it, but it’s good to keep at least 1 entry on there to show banks that you have some real world exposure.
Forget Chronological Order
While you should usually use reverse chronological order for your resume, there’s no “rule” that says you have to strictly follow it.
So if you have “JP Morgan Investment Banking Case Competition” please put that at the top of your Work Experience no matter what the date was.
If you’re no longer in school this gets harder to justify and you should stick more closely to chronological order.
Move Your School to the Bottom
In the case where you have brand-name companies on your resume and a non-brand-name school, you could move Work Experience to the top and put Education below it instead.
That may raise some questions if you’re still in school – but it is an option if you’ve recently graduated and you feel that your work experience looks more impressive than your school, GPA, or major.
We’re not using this strategy here because this student is applying for summer internships and because his university – while not a “target school” – is also far from unknown.
The End Result
You can see for yourself right here.
We’ve using the exact same experience, but we’re presenting it differently, focusing on different points, and excluding what doesn’t matter.
And this student now has a much better chance of getting interviews and landing offers.
What to Do When You’re Out of School
If you’ve already graduated or you’ve been working for a few years, you can still apply some of these strategies.
The main difference is that you can’t get away with turning all your activities into “work experience” as a student might be able to.
You can still list them on your resume, but you need to focus on “bankifying” your real work experience by focusing on the business results and the big picture.
Wait, Is All of This Legal?
You might also be wondering if everything I’ve suggested here is “legal.” Will you be flagged during background checks? Get your offer rescinded because you omitted something?
No.
While you shouldn’t omit major summer internships, leaving out part-time, unpaid, or informal experience is fine.
And spinning experience into sounding bigger than it really was is not lying – it’s just spinning.
All of This Helps, But…
Also note that while the strategies here will help you get interviews and will make your resume look more substantial, you’re still not going to “beat” the guy or girl with a Goldman Sachs internship and an Ivy League school on his/her resume.
So you won’t be able to level the playing field completely, but you can give yourself a boost and reduce the gap between yourself and everyone else applying.
What Now?
If you’re applying for internships or full-time positions and you don’t have much real work experience think about what you could spin into sounding relevant: Clubs? Activities? Your Own Portfolio?
What are the 2-3 most relevant experiences to focus on? What could be omitted to make room for more relevant entries?
Think about all that, and then re-write your resume and spin your way to success.
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Hi, just a quick question on a minor detail, is there a standard on which verb tense to use for resumes? I’ve always used present tense for things I am continuing (build DCF model) and past tense for things that I have completed (analyzed FCF). Or should I not be worrying about this small thing?
Thanks lots.
It doesn’t really matter – I prefer using past tense for everything but doesn’t matter either way.
Brian,
As always, thanks for the post. Why don’t you state the names of the mining and natural gas companies? Because they’re assumed to be not well known? Would you state the names if they were well known?
Because I couldn’t think of anything clever on-the-spot. :) But yes, if you have names and could disclose them you should mention them here.
How do I list my own portfolio as work experience as a last resort? (when I have nothing else to list? no previous employment or student activities…?)
Truth be told, my bank manager tightly controls my money, so I don’t know anything about my own portfolio, but unfortunately that’s the only item that I could put on my resume.
In my case, I believe I should only focus on networking and forget about my resume, as I go to a target. But my resume looks very shallow… please advise.
Similar to what’s on here for the student investment fund experience – just write about a few stocks you invested in, or a few stocks you followed and were interested in. Very similar to the language on here. While focusing on networking is good, you still need *a* resume to apply in the first place.
If I get an internship at Morgan Stanley M&A or something like that the year before freshman year, do I have a shot at getting into PE at Carlyle/Blackstone by the time I graduate?
Sure
I am a college student who recently got an internship from a local PE firm.
I will be doing some finance related works, but when I told my interviewer that I have some visual basic experiences (working for school IT), he seemed really impressed.
As I reviewed necessary documents (employment paper, school papers, etc) regarding the hiring, I realized that my supervisor wants me to do tasks involving “intranet development”, along with other finance stuffs (he did not specify, just wrote stuffs like scope of blah blah blah and financial blah blah blah stuffs).
I am afraid that I won’t be doing much, or at least relatively less finance related work once I start working.
How should I tell my supervisor I am more interested in finance-side of the business, and will I able to transit eventually?
What are your suggestions?
Make a good first impression the first few weeks, and then ask for more finance-related work once everyone likes you and views you as reliable.
Any plans on coming out with PE interview guides? case studies?
Thinking about it but the PE interview guide would have a lot of overlap with the modeling program and IB interview guide so not sure if it would be a completely separate product.
For SA recruiting if I’m a sophomore but I’m graduating in 3 years is it okay to apply as a Junior?
Yes
How much will a Rhodes scholar help for IBD?
It helps but less than a solid internship.
Quick question,
I am a freshman at a top target and I am looking at middle market and smaller firms (mainly real estate investment banking and private equity) in my local area for this summer just to get some kind of finance experience. I have found about 20 firms with alumni from my school and was wondering when I email them should I include my resume in that initial email.
I have about a 3.7-3.8 gpa based on my first semester. I know it’s a good GPA, but if I include my resume, they will know right away I am a freshman and will probably disregard me without talking to me first. What should I do or go about talking to them?
Thanks so much
If you’re contacting alumni I would not include your resume – just email them to set up a time to speak on the phone or meet in-person first rather than asking directly for an internship.
If a bank sees “entrepreneurship” on your resume will they think you won’t be a good fit for the culture? I had a suspicion about this and just changed it to “part time”
On a related note, is there a best way to spin entrepreneurial experiences? In my case I got involved in a startup project that was research based and actually involved going through 10-K’s and financial statements but sometimes I feel like employers won’t take it seriously if I try to sell it hard.
Thanks!
It depends how you present it – in your case I would spin it to make it look finance-related and just write about your work with the financial statements. I would not use the word “entrepreneurship” because banks want docile people – saying it was “part-time” or down-playing it is the better bet.
Slight diversion from the topic, Is applying through the career section of websites of bulge brackets, a good idea if you have been working in an M&A boutique (for about 2 years). Does any one care to look at the resume submitted there?
In general no one will look at it. Sometimes you do get responses, but don’t spend much time submitting blind applications online – focus on talking with real people.
Hi,
I signed up for the Networking Ninja Toolkit but there seemed to have some technical problem so that I ordered and paid for Networking Ninja AND Financial Modeling program which I don’t need. I have send an email to you on this. Could you help to fix that and cancel the order for Financial Modeling program?
Thanks!
I found that I had the access to the courses immediately after I paid, which made my previous post inappropiate. Thus, I would like to keep the order. I am sorry about that.
Janet: Just emailed you about this.
Hey M&I,
Thanks for this post, it’s really relevant to my situation.
I have participated in 3 different competitions from bulge bracket banks (they are my only finance related experience other than a few courses and some consulting type extracurricular), would you recommend listing them separately (equity research comp, trading game, finance trivia game), or grouping them into a general category and then specifying what I did for each? The equity research competition entailed a lot more work than the other two, which is why I’m hesitant about listing them separately, but I didn’t want to leave the other two out since I’m scarce on experiences.
Thanks!
I would probably list the equity research competition as 1 entry, and then combine the other 2 into a separate entry.
Would you say that VB.Net and Excel VBA skills are quite plus for an entry level analyst? Or not so much? Or does it depend on the banks/firms (like size, specialty, etc)
Doesn’t matter much regardless
I don’t have “banking” experiences, but have other finance-related experiences (campus-budget office, insurance company, accounting firm).
You think it will be easy for me to spin these experiences and or will I be looked down as just an another non-banking guy, who tries to break into banking?
Well, what other choice do you have? I would definitely spin them as much as possible.
Thanks for a very insightful article!!
Coming from a non-target, I was thinking about attending a target school’s career fair. If I do this, should I contact the school asking permission to attend or should I just go? If I do ask permission and they say no but I go anyway and can easily get in (without the school’s I.D. card or any confirmation), should I do it? Would banks ask me or someone else if I was granted permission attend? I’m a currently a sophomore looking for summer internships and I want build up my contact list, would be attending these career fairs as a sophomore be a good idea? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for all of your help!
Just go, it’s always a good idea. No need for formalities.
Good evening from Wisconsin!
I have been a dedicated reader of yours for the past 6 months and have enjoyed every article so far!
I am a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business and have a business analyst internship at Target Corp this upcoming summer. Do you think this will be good enough experience to capture the interest of investment banks when I am a junior? Or do you think I should keep this internship in reserve and seek out more investment-related internships?
Keep up the good work and happy new year!
-Brandon
That one is ok but I would try for something better.
Hey M&I,
I really need your advice…
I am a first-year MBA student. I landed a Fixed Income Sales summer internship with a BB’s Mumbai office, largely because I go to a target b-school.
What should I do to ace my internship? I am ready to read whatever books, etc, that will help me work in tandem with the full-timers.
I really need a full-time offer and needless to say, competition is stiff. I have zero finance experience and I am no great shakes in Excel-related stuff either.
I really wanted to break into IBD, but fate had other plans. Is there any chance to shift to IBD after starting out in Sales?
Thanks a ton
There are a bunch of articles on the site on how to exceed in your internships – the basic point is that you need to make everyone like you and come across as personable rather than trying to “act smart” or prove that you’re a genius. Be reliable and make people like you and you’ll get an offer. You can move into IBD after Sales esp. since it’s just an internship.
Hi, If I have been trading independently in the equity market for 2 or more years. ( I just graduated from a non-target with 3.2GPA and dont have a BBA degree ) should I put it on my resume?? and should I put down some stocks that I actually research and analyze on ?? thats by far the closest thing I can get, my other experiences is all non-related to finance. ( mostly sales ) what other things I can do to improve the chance of getting an interview from middle / boutique firm ??
Thanks so much for answering my questions
Sure, I would list it if you’ve only graduated recently. Aside from that, it’s all about networking… sales experience is ok to list as well, but I would definitely put the trading entry at the top.
What would recruiters think about listing poker in the interest section of a resume? I’ve found it makes for interesting conversation when I’ve mentioned it in interviews for internships in the past. I would see it as pretty relevant, especially for a sales & trading job, but I’m worried I could be dismissed as reckless or a gambler.
It’s fine to list.
Do you have any relevant, small resume boosters that a Sophomore undergrad could get together in the coming months before summer?
I do all the Investopedia portfolio simulation type things, but I want something real that could make it onto a resume. Getting onto the student endowment management won’t happen until at least next fall, and I’m wondering if you can give some pointers on what to get involved in.
Just so you know, I realize that I won’t be getting an awesome internship relevant to investment banking this summer. I am just hoping for a decent finance one that may lead to something better the following summer.
Please post a response or send me an email if possible. Any help would be appreciated…
It’s pretty much student activities, seminars put on by banks, shadowing programs, or doing some trading of your own – I don’t have any great suggestions aside from those, but it doesn’t matter that much as long as you do get involved with something that looks relevant by internship recruiting next year.
What are your views on including a photo of yourself in your resume?
Don’t do it unless you’re in a region where it’s standard practice (e.g. parts of Asia) otherwise it looks very weird.
I wrote on my resume that I invested in XTO energy stocks based on acquisition potential..(,which I did) and just found out that JPM advised Exxon and BarCap and Jefferies advised XTO. Guess what? I have SA interviews with them next week!
I know about the deal ($41b in stock including $10 debt) from reading news, but what do you think they will ask me? What would you ask me if you were an interviewer? Please advise!
I wouldn’t worry too much over this, just read up on it in the WSJ Deal Blog and see what they had to say… just be able to describe the rationale and give an idea of the relevant deal multiples (revenue, EBITDA, etc.).
I’m a junior at a top 10 liberal arts school, pretty non-target I guess, and my gpa is ~3.6. I have no real work experience and all I’ve been able to land is a wealth management internship for this summer. Is this internship going to hurt me? Apart from networking to death, is there anything else can i do to break into iBanking? Will I have a shot at an iBanking job after graduation since I won’t have any IB internships?
Yes, you can still move in coming from a PWM internship. It is much better than having nothing finance-related. At this point you have to go through the networking grind, not much else will help in terms of IBD offers.
I am senior graduating Dec 2010, but I dont have much IB experience. How do I write about my portfolio as part of working experience? I have passed the CFA LVL 1 exam but where and how should I include it in my resume.
Just make each major investment you’ve made a separate bullet and write about why and how you made the investment. For CFA I would just list it at the bottom under Certifications
Hi. A very insightful article. I am working at one of the world’s biggest bank and is reputed in IB. However, I am not working in their IBD. I am working as a cash operations analyst in one of the other departments and im unhappy as it has nothing to do with IB or trading/investments. Internal Job postings do not have anything for the posts of IB Analyst’s/Associates. My ultimate career aim is IB and im worried that my current job might not help my resume if i want to get into IB. I am a Bachelors Degree Holder and I plan to do my MBA a few years from now. What would you suggest? Also, how important is CFA to get into IB?
The CFA is useless. You should try to get something more related to finance first, even if it’s not at a bank (corp. fin. at a large company, PWM, etc.) and then use that with the MBA to break in.
Hi, thanks you all for making such a helpful web. I am currently enrolled in the best program for our school and my school is pretty much the best school in this country, but the nature of our program is such that the faculty makes it really hard and about only 50% students can actually make to the second year and whoever left are really competitive . Within this program i dunt really have a good GPA. I am still looking forward to get in IB. Do you think i should switch program to get a better mark ? Our program has really high reputation within Canada.
I would switch programs if your grades are low (below, say, 3.5 or equivalent in the Canadian system). No program is worth it if your grades suffer.
Brian- Does the background check involve calling every single place on the work experience section on resume? I did some online work for pretty well-known organization, which I can spin to make it sound relevant finance. But it was just a volunteer experience conducted online, and I was no longer in contact with the person who assigned work to me. Really debating whether to put it on my resume or not because it really isn’t a real work experience (like one in an office setting, with contract etc), and it’s not gonna be really possible if the background check party wants to call the organization to verify. What do you think?
Depends on the bank – I avoid answering background check questions because it changes all the time, every place does it differently, etc. I would leave it off if you’re uncertain.
Hey just discovered your site and I am blown away. You’ve done a great deal helping everyone great work! I also need some serious advice! Here’s my odd predicament. I got my bachelors of science in bio DEC 09 at ‘some school’ on the path to med school (did it for my family to be happy). I started trading when I was 19(3 yrs ago)when I raised and managed .25 M dollars which I day-traded daily on 4x margin but this was right before the apocalypse and it was the worst year for my partner and I. I still trade daily and am addicted to numbers/charts/graphs and its always been a dream for me to break into this sector. Now my question is I have been offered a BACK office job as a Personal Banker at a BRANCH of Wells Fargo, which is pitiful then again I have no finance experience. Would you recommend me beginning here to break in, wait and get an internship, or just apply with my current experience (investing, self-employed, and sales exp)?
If you are set on doing trading, then you could potentially get in from the middle or back office… but it’s probably better to go to something middle-office related like trade settlements instead. I’d say go for middle-office roles first and see if you can get those, then move into trading.
Hi,
Thanks for the post. This is a great site and has been really useful.
I’m expecting to graduate from Imperial College in July 2011 with a first degree but I have no relevant work experience. Not even any JP Morgan competitions. Just some engineering work experience and membership of finance societies at university. I was wondering what my chances of breaking into investment banking were?
Thanks for the advice!
It will be difficult if you have absolutely no work experience, but in Europe that situation is more common so maybe not the end of the world.
I am going to do a Masters in Management, but have no relevant work experience, as in nothing related to Finance. It seems like I have no chance.
Then create your own experience… start a finance or investment club, set up your own workshop, do something different and you will get noticed.