Overview of MFin career development at Cambridge Judge Business School
The MFin has maximum impact when you work in partnership with the Careers team. The Career Development Programme is carefully designed to adapt to individual needs and deliver the broad range of skills needed to achieve significant professional transformations. MFin students receive one-to-one coaching throughout the year from members of the dedicated Careers Team based at the Business School, as well as from external Careers Consultants with specialism in industry sectors.
Additionally, the Cambridge MFin has a number of ties to the finance industry. This is clearly exhibited in the rich portfolio of corporate sponsored projects our students undertake every year. A broad range of senior city speakers join us on campus every week to share their professional insights with the class.
Our approach
The Career Development Programme is made up of three main areas:
- understanding yourself and identifying your career goals
- job search and planning skills
- creating successful job applications and applying effective interview skills.
Resources and support
Career advice and information
The Career Team will work with industry experts and career professionals, and use additional resources to help you explore what your drivers and goals are. The team will assist you in ensuring you have the confidence and skillset required to get your ideal job
Practical workshops and surgeries
The Career Development programme provides you with access to workshops and surgeries that allow you to meet your goals. The idea of these sessions are to equip you with the tools required to:
- define your career goals
- plan your career strategy
- carry out research and job searches
- make effective applications
- refine and apply your interview skills
- build your story
- communicate the value of your programme
- create your CV.
We recognise you as an individual
We understand that every individual has different needs and your experience will be different to someone else’s. So alongside our core sessions we have a number of optional workshops, which allow you to customise the career provision to work best for you.
Examples of sessions we are likely to run include:
- Implementing a Systemic Career Management Framework to Ensure Success
- Creating Your Personal Brand Workshop and Surgeries
- Smarter Networking
- Working with Executive Search Firms
Advice and coaching tailored to you
Throughout the academic year we offer you comprehensive individual advisory and coaching appointments with member of the Careers Team as well as Career Consultants.
These appointments will be available from mid Autumn once you have undertaken the initial careers courses and workshops provided in the early part of your first term. These sessions are intended to help identify and refine the goals you have for your career, and support you in developing a realistic strategy to achieve your ideal job.
Recruitment events and job opportunities
We host a range of events by leading name employers. These companies also post jobs on our career system, contact students they’ve identified as suitable for their roles, and work one-to-one with the Careers Team to share opportunities.
The Careers Team work with companies and alumni connections to organise student visits and webinars to help provide you with an insider perspective of working within particular companies or industries.
Companies hosted on campus or by webinar in 2021/22 include:
- Actis
- Alvarez and Marsal
- Amazon
- Analysis Group
- Apollo
- BearingPoint Capital
- BlackRock
- Citi
- Credit Suisse
- EY-Parthenon
- Invesco
- JP Morgan
- KPMG
- McKinsey
- Morgan Stanley
- Partners Group
- PwC
- Rothschild Five Arrows
Rankings
The Cambridge MFin programme was ranked second in the world by the Financial Times 2022 Master of Finance rankings.
The strength of our career outcomes has been a key contributing factor to our position in the rankings:
- Our careers service ranks first among post-experience master of finance courses globally
- Average salary increase of 61%
- Average salary of $139,577(USD)
- 85% employed within three months
- 88% of alumni say they fulfilled their goals or reasons for doing a masters
The above data was taken from the Financial Times 2022 rankings of Master of Finance programmes which measured career outcomes of graduates within three years of completing studies.
Women in finance
[MUSIC PLAYING] The difficulty in the finance industry is really striking a balance in terms of your work and your life. And I think that has been a challenge that many financial institutions have been facing, in terms of retention.
It’s structural. I think the banking industry, traditionally, was designed for men by men. And therefore, there really wasn’t a space for women to get in.
How the industry is structured, the kind of reward system– finance industry, mainly rewards people who put in a lot more hours. Then you’ll find that women are really disadvantaged in that aspect.
So I think the combination of the intensity of the hours, the very sort of heavy transaction driven environment, the deadlines, the travel, is a factor that has perhaps inhibited some women who want to maintain that balance from furthering their careers.
So what the industry can do, I think, it starts with the people that are in the industry. I think it’s great that we have a lot more female leaders. We need more female leaders to then be role models for other young people, but equally they need to be at the table to shape the conversation. And say that having women in finance is important.
I believe there is power in diversity, even within genders. And that is why it is important that the perceptions in the industry change fast. And women participation is increased at all levels of businesses, at board level, at senior management level. And this could, I believe firmly, that this can really enhance businesses in terms of their performance, instead in terms of how they are viewed in the industry, in terms of how they give back to community, in terms of how the community views the firms.
I think, generally speaking, clients would benefit hugely from having more balance in terms of the relationship managers, the fund managers, the wealth managers who are actually managing their money, the different asset classes, by bringing in those diverse views and diverse attitudes to risks that would be much better represented if you had more balance in terms of male and female constituents who are actually driving those investment decisions.
What I’d like to see in my lifetime, of course, and even for my daughter, is that when she comes into finance, it’s no longer an anomaly. It’s no longer unusual for her to be here. And it’s no longer unusual for her to aspire to the highest level of this industry.
Career support: Personal and professional development
At Cambridge Judge Business School, we are committed to helping you focus on your professional future. To support you with achieving your professional objectives, we work closely with you throughout the programme, helping you identify career goals and design action plans to meet them.
On the MFin programme, we provide opportunities for you to learn about the broader finance industry and its various sub-sectors. Throughout the year there will be opportunities for you to interact and network with senior finance professionals and alumni.
We strongly encourage you to make use of these opportunities to build your own professional network which should be at the heart of your job search endeavours throughout your MFin year and beyond.
Our careers service is designed to help you gain the insight and skills to manage your career, both while you’re a student at Cambridge Judge Business School and after graduating from the MFin programme.
The careers programme encompasses various workshops, seminars, on-line resources as well one to one coaching sessions designed to help students with their career planning and job search endeavours, as well as to strengthen soft skills such as negotiation, networking and presentation skills and interview technique.
The key aims of our careers service are to help you:
- assess your professional and academic background, skill sets, strengths and weaknesses
- keep informed about the latest sector developments and defining your career goals
- build a toolkit of skills to help you with ‘marketing’ yourself effectively
- interview successfully
- analyse, negotiate and accept a job offer.
The MFin programme works closely with professional careers consultants, industry practitioners as well as a range of external careers professionals who come in regularly to deliver tailored personal and professional development workshops, provide career guidance, and run one-to-one coaching.
One-to-one mentoring scheme
We offer a mentoring scheme during the academic year, pairing the students with alumni depending on their history and career aspirations. Mentors guide and provide careers support to the students on the development of their interpersonal skills, interview skills, careers navigation, and share with the student their own career journey and the latest development in their sector.
Networking: Leverage our networks and meet our alumni
A significant benefit of the programme is the opportunity it provides to engage with bright, ambitious and creative people from a variety of backgrounds. This interaction enables you to build lifelong networks.
The University of Cambridge has a thriving community of world class faculty, students, powerful alumni groups, and committed corporate supporters:
Finance professionals and experts
Cambridge Judge Business School and MFin programme have strong networks with the corporate world, including specific links with the banking and finance industry.
Practitioners will play a central role in the delivery of the programme through teaching, seminars and involvement in various practical MFin projects.
During the programme you will attend guest lectures within MFin City Speaker Series (see relevant tab above) which brings the world’s authorities in finance to the MFin classroom.
Students can meet industry leaders and experts, ask questions and share ideas with them over dinner in a Cambridge College.
Alumni
Cambridge Judge Business School’s alumni network allows you to keep in touch with your fellow students and the School after graduation. This growing network also offers mutual support for students at the School. We hold a number of networking events throughout the year, with alumni currently working in finance.
There are over 400 MFin alumni working in more than 40 countries around the world. Our alumni work in a large number of different finance areas, functions and top global companies.
The MFin programme team helps to organise various local alumni gatherings around the world. For more information please see our Events page.
Peers
The School attracts the highest calibre of people from a range of different backgrounds, which fosters an atmosphere of global collaboration and provides unique opportunities for discussion and learning.
All MFin students attend lectures together which makes it easier to build relationships throughout the course. Please see our latest class profile.
Academic faculty
Resident and visiting academic faculty from disciplines such as Finance, Mathematics, Economics, Law and Land Economy, many of whom are leaders in their field of expertise.
MFin graduation
Watch the interviews of our MFin students on their graduation day.
Class profile
Find out more about the 2022/23 MFin class.
City Speaker Series
The Master of Finance City Speaker Series provides a further stream of practical financial expertise to the degree. It also provides students regular networking opportunities with finance professionals. The speakers are experts in their fields working at the daily cutting edge of applied finance.
[MUSIC PLAYING] It’s very nice to be here again and lovely to be associated in a small way with a course that seems to be growing, and successful, and obviously popular. The city speaker series is a valuable addition to the MFIN degree, providing practical financial expertise and regular networking opportunities with financial professionals.
I’m really delighted to be here this evening. This is my first visit to Cambridge. And so as a result, I’m also in awe of this historic location.
So a pleasure to be here today. What I’m going to talk to you this evening about is what’s been happening in the world of credit ratings since 2008.
I’ll give you a little bit of background on me, how I got to where I am. And what we do, what my job was at Goldman, what the fund does?
I’ve got a set of slides to go through which really talk about the firm I work for which is Apax. It’s a large global private equity firm and then to go through the bit of the firm that I run, which is The Media Team.
We invite speakers who are experts in their fields and who work at the cutting edge of applied finance.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The city speaker events, the finance practitioners come up here once a week, and they’re talking to you. And so not only do you know what’s going on in the market, but you also know what are the new techniques being implemented in finance. And that’s also very interesting.
We have practitioners coming in and teaching us like CFOs of bulge bracket banks or founders of huge hedge fund companies. And these guys are giving us their experiences, and they’re sharing their experiences with us, which you cannot find in a textbook. And this is why I’m here. And that is what I really like about the course.
Speaker dinners have been other wonderful chance to meet with a wide range of industrial professionals from all of those fields of the finance. And so we were able to get their advices and recommendations for job applications as well as our career developments.
The city speaker events is great. And we also get to go to dinner with them afterwards. And on top of it all, you’re in Cambridge. You are a part of 800 years of living history, and the city is great. And you know I think it is fantastic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We aim to cover a wide range of subjects, institutions, product areas and roles. The subjects will be determined by the speakers themselves, with a focus on topical themes, deals and business problems that they have faced.
Recent speakers
- Anne-Marie Fleurbaaij, Managing Director, Cambridge University Endowment Fund
- Kristine Braden, Managing Director, Head of Europe Global Subsidiaries Group, Citi
- Paul Tucker, Partner at Egerton, Egerton Capital
- Dania Seiglie, Managing Director, Energy, Societe Generale, Corporate & Investment Banking
- Hosein Khajeh-Hosseiny, Managing Director and Head of Global Private Equity Investments, Northgate Capital
- Chris Eagle, Chief Executive Officer, Aquila Markets
- Helen Steers, Partner, Pantheon Ventures
- Laurence Hopkins, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley
- Kevin Gardiner, Managing Director, Rothschild & Co
- Jan-Peter Onstwedder, Managing Director, Citi
- Laura Bottega, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley
- Alex O’Cinneide, CEO, Gore Street Capital
- Irina Kim, Director, Citi
- Amelia Armour, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners
- Philip Noblet, Head of UK and Investment Banking, Jefferies
