Rating five career options for business students. Jobs rated on salary, difficulty, and work hours. The five careers I analyse are management consulting, investment banking, big tech, accounting, and entrepreneurship.
What’s up everyone it’s kenji here and in this video i’m gonna be sharing five career paths for to other majors that are somewhat related or overlapped with business right so things like management finance or economics are probably also going to be applicable to this video so the five that i’ve picked are management
Consulting the software engineering side but more the and then lastly we’ll look at entrepreneurship and basically i’m going to be rating these based on five stars and the three main metrics that one the difficulty to get the job number hours they have to work for this job and then lastly the pay
Right and i’ll be getting into actual numbers of how much each one pays as well as bonuses and other things like that and obviously these are just five career paths they’re by no means the only ones it’s just five that i thought would be handy to you as they’re fairly popular these days and if this video does well
Um i will try to make a part two so make sure you hit that like and subscribe button so the first career path is management consulting and is it’s basically just helping big companies improve their performance in exchange for a fee right so at its core it’s just problem solving that sense and some of the examples
Of say things that you might be assigned to do or your firm might be assigned to do are for instance say bmw is considering entering a new market say i don’t know the bicycle market then you might be in charge of researching if the market’s viable if it’s something that’s worth bmw moving into right could be
Something like hey we see our employees on facebook aren’t very motivated is there a way to change the compensation scheme so that they’re going to be more motivated so you do research on hey is a bonus a good idea to put in here are stock options a good idea are things like that right and some examples of the biggest
Management consulting firms are mbb which stands for one’s mckinsey the other one is bain and the other one’s bcg boston consulting group those are by far the three biggest ones there’s obviously some some other ones like oliver wyman or accenture and so on but i’ll be focusing on these big three for now
All right so the first metric is work life balance and management consultants are known to work a lot not as much as investment bankers which we’ll get into in another section but they still put in a good say 70 hours a week which is definitely a lot more than say your average 40 hour work week right that said they also
Have to travel quite a bit in that maybe they spend a couple weeks in a in a month outside their offices in a hotel somewhere basically because they’re at their clients office right so basically your client expects you to be there throughout the week which is why they have to travel around so much now obviously this
Is changing with remote work and other things like that but it’s still fairly common for management consultants to travel so for those reasons we’ll for the pay it obviously varies by location but bcg and bain they will pay around a hundred one of the big us cities right so basically 90 000 would be
The base salary you would have a sign-in bonus of around 5 000 and another 15 000 depending on how good your bonus is right in terms of performance but something along the lines of 110 000 is not unrealistic to think of so it’s definitely a lot of money and here’s a chart kind of comparing the different ones out there
And here it’s also worth noting that the usp is a lot more than most other countries right like look at this chart here where it says that the uk consultant made an average of 46 000 pounds which if you convert it to us dollars that’s around 65 thousand that said there’s obviously cost of living tax other things
Like that that probably are the compare well to other career options let’s break it down on a per hour basis instead of on an absolute basis right so let’s say that they work for 50 weeks a year so they get two weeks of holiday 50 weeks a year and as we said earlier they work 70 hours a week 70 hours a week right
So basically gives you around 31 dollars per hour as a salary which i think is fairly reasonable so let’s put a four star out of five for that now in terms of difficulty management consulting is definitely very very hard to get into especially the big three as i mentioned earlier mckenzie bcg and bain they’re very
Very competitive to get into they don’t disclose acceptance rates but i’d say it’s well below the five percent mark out of the applicants that actually get the job right as for locations typically those locations that don’t just speak english so they have a local language like say tokyo or shanghai are probably
Going to be a lot less competitive because not that many people speak both in japanese and english or mandarin and english right as opposed to new york or london where you only really need to speak one language right and the reason it’s so competitive is because a lot of people want this basically the job pays well the job
Leaves a lot of options open in that consulting is quite a vague industry so you can obviously moving to other areas if you want to later on those are the main reasons why it’s so competitive and i’ll leave this free resource in the description which is basically going to give you a breakdown of all the necessary steps
To get into management consulting if that’s the road you want to take so in terms of difficulty we’ll give that a 5 star alright so moving on to the second career path which is investment banking and if you don’t know what investment banking is at its core it’s two main things number one is financing meaning
You help companies and governments raise money in the financial markets and then number two it has to do with advisories so basically you help them out and you consult them on things related should you have in your balance sheet where should you allocate your money other things like that are what people typically pay them
For and if that’s not very clear still you can check out this other video that i made which is basically a commercial bank and an investment monk banks the most renowned out there are known as the bulge bracket which are basically the largest investment banks in the world so think like hsbc of america
And so on and so forth there’s also some other more specialized one which specialized ones which are known as boutique investment banks and these are centreview lazard and others which just basically specialize in one specific thing now looking into the three main metrics when it comes to work-life balance to be honest
There investment bankers work around 80 hours a week which is even worse than management consultants and if you want to see the details of that i’ll put a video up here this is basically out of about my time at goldman sachs where i put in a good 80 hours a week more or less that also includes weekends and as
For travel there’s typically not that much travel that’s something fairly unusual in investment banking so for those reasons we’ll put the work-life balance at a one star in terms of pay it’s definitely very high and hence why you have to worry so much so typically it’s around 85 000 as your base salary on top of that you
Get a get a performance bonus obviously dependent on performance but it’s usually around the 50 000 range so it gives you a total of around 145 000. as for whether that’s a lot or not let’s break it down on a per hour basis to see weeks that gives you around 36 dollars per hour obviously it doesn’t sound
Quite as nice as 145 000 but nonetheless it’s a lot of money so we’ll give it a 5 stars for now in terms of difficulty investment banking is definitely very very hard to get into much like management consulting if you look at this fun article by business insider which is called the 11 things that are harder to get
Into than harvard it does include goldman sachs which is probably the most sought after investment bank and it has an acceptance rate of three percent now i’d say most other investment banks aren’t quite as low but they’re still between the three and five percent mark right so for those reasons for difficulty we’ll give
That five stars description for investment banking i found this one on the internet and it basically goes through all of the different things that you need to know to recruit for an investment all the way from what is an investment to the types of interviews there are out there so i think it might be useful to
You guys all right so next up we have big tech and obviously as business students you’re probably not going to be working as software engineers but rather more on the business side of tech right so things like account management business development finance accounting marketing other things along those lines right and
As for examples i mean i don’t think i need to give too many but the big five or google amazon apple microsoft and facebook right those are regarded as the big five but obviously there’s other big tech companies that you probably use on your day-to-day like snapchat or spotify others along those lines right
Work-life balance it’s actually pretty good typically it sits around 40 to 60 hours that’s at least based on my experience at amazon as well as some some of my other colleagues working on google and places like that so it’s pretty good i’d say in that sense usually on weekends you don’t have to work unless you you’ve
Messed up or something so for those reasons also the dress code usually there’s no dress code the offices are fairly fancy because they’re tech offices um sometimes the food’s even free so for those reasons we’ll the pay package is a bit confusing in tech and to it the first one is the base salary which
In the big cities say in new york san francisco seattle it’s around 80 000 then secondly you get what’s called the signing bonus which is actually split into two two years which is i don’t know why it’s a bit confusing uh basically it’s around 25 000 for a two years so 12.5 for one year right and then in addition to that
You have shares but obviously the shares are not fixed in value right they go up and down but it’s typically around the 50 000 mark that said you don’t actually get the shares on your day one instead they have what’s called a vesting period which essentially means that you can only get them after you’ve worked for a
Set period of time at the company right so yeah even more confusing but anyways let’s just put a hundred thousand as your year one salary for a week say that’s the average of the 40 hours and 60 that we’ve said before and then you work for 50 hours that probably gives you around the 40 mark per hour right which on
A relative basis is definitely a lot better than investment banking a five star for now in terms of difficulty obviously software engineering is very difficult to get into at a big tech firm but on the other hand for more business oriented roles the truth is that there’s just not that much information on it
I even worked at amazon myself and i wasn’t able to gather much information about it so um yeah i’m just gonna not be able to give you much data on this so we’ll just put a three star in terms of difficulty for now all right so the fourth career option is accounting and if you don’t know what accounting is it’s basically
The way for a company to maintain accurate records of their financial position so if they want to look at things like hey how much profit did we make last year or hey um how much do we have in sales how much do we owe the bank again other questions like that can easily be solved with accounting right so role of an
Accountant is basically two ways the first one is to find these figures so calculate them that’s accounting and then the other one is auditing which is basically verifying that these accounts are actually true and that they make sense right so i personally worked at pwc as an intern as an auditor and basically they would
Send me out my team obviously and we would get into their finance team and start to look at their accounting rates so if everything makes sense or not and then we would create what’s called an audi report and based on that we would certify that their accounts are correct or their incorrect rate so when you
See big accounting scandals like those of wirecard that we saw recently in germany that’s basically got to do with accounting and auditing now some examples of the big accounting firms are known as the big four which stand for pwc ey kpmg and deloitte those are a big four um they basically have offices really all around
The world if you uh live in a decent size city odds are they’re going to be there and they have around 200 really massive and they also have some other departments not just accounting right they also do things like consulting they do things like legal services transactions and other things like that now
When it comes to work-life balance i’d they probably work around 40 to 60-hour weeks it does get somewhat busy during say january to to march during that spring season and the reasons that most companies are closing their accounts and they’re getting ready to file taxes and things like that right but overall uh
The pricks are not quite as good as big tech in that you still have to go in a suit because you’re meeting clients um the office is typically you know as cool or as fancy if you will as that of a tech firm but i’ll still give it out of work-life balance let’s say a four-star is fairly reasonable so for the pay in
The big u.s cities like new york and san francisco there’s usually two main parts to it the first one is the base salary which is usually around the sixty thousand dollar mark and then you have the bonus which obviously depends on performance right but it’s usually on the around the five thousand dollar mark so it’s 65
000 in total if we put that on a relative basis to compare to the other ones let’s say they work for 50 probably leaves you around 26 dollars per hour which is not bad as in you’re probably not a star from that but at the same time it’s nowhere near those reasons we’ll give it a three star rating now in
Terms of difficulty it’s nowhere near as competitive as investment banking or management consulting and basically the reasons that a lot of people think that accounting is boring i’m not saying that’s my case i’m not getting into that but yeah a lot of people think that it’s boring and hence why it’s not as competitive
Right so basically if you have a good degree and you have good grades odds are you’ll at least get to the interview stage so for those reasons when it comes to difficulty to getting the job we’ll give it a two star all right so the last option in this video is entrepreneurship and that’s basically just starting your
Own business right i don’t think i need to give many examples but some of the more recent startups that went mainstream include doordash that was founded in 2013 what is there there’s robin hood also founded in 2013 as well as wework which is founded in 2010. so looking at the three main metrics when it comes
To work-life balance the reality is that as an entrepreneur you’re probably gonna have to work a lot a lot more than you would in your regular job at least if you want your business to do well right um when looking at the successful companies out there most of the founders said they did work over 80 hours a week weekends
Inclusive and at the end of the day you’re only giving yourself an advantage if you work longer right so for those reasons um assuming that you want your business to do well we’ll put the work hours of five stars as for pay it’s hard to say most businesses to be honest end up failing and so they obviously don’t
Generate any money right which is why they fail but on the other hand if you look at the forbes list most of the billionaires up there are company going to get to that level but there is the upside potential that say your regular job doesn’t have right so for pay for now i’m just gonna put two stars as it’s probably
More likely that it goes uh bankrupt or that your business fails as opposed to it say becoming getting on the first list right and lastly when it comes to difficulty entrepreneurship is one star mainly because you don’t need the permission from anyone to do it um it’s not like you need to get into an interview or
Anything like that you just go ahead and get started now i’m not saying that the business is gonna do well obviously that depends on other factors but to start it you don’t really need anything so yeah those are five career options for business graduates um i do realize that for salaries it’s a bit of a rough guide in
That if you live in other cities that are not say the big ones in the us they’re probably going to pay you a bit less especially because the cost of living is going to be less right and the same applies if you live abroad probably the us pays the most compared to other european cities or cities in asia right
And also i do want to mention that if there’s any inaccuracies feel free to point them out if i think it’s correct obviously i want the best information to be out there for you guys and lastly i realized that most of the things that i analyzed are more numbers oriented if you will so if you like me to do more letters
Oriented type of those like that relate to say marketing hr that like and subscribe if the video does well i’ll consider doing it so hope you found it useful and i’ll hopefully catch on the next one
Transcribed from video
Careers for Business Students (and what they pay) By Kenji Explains