Investment Banking Resume
When crafting your job application, you should pay special attention to your resume. Getting it right may not be easy. Especially, when you need an investment banking resume.
To help you land a job, we are going to share some effective job-winning tips and efficient sample banking resumes.
How to Write an Investment Banking Resume?
To craft a winning resume, one has to find the right layout of his or her key skills and experiences that would engage recruiters and potential employers and make you stand out among other candidates.
If you are wondering how to write a resume for bank jobs, here are the key takeaways you should keep in mind:
- Highlight relevant banker skills. First of all, to make a successful career in investment banking, you need to have a solid set of skills, both job-related and general. In your resume, your main goal is to highlight that you have the right mix of hard and soft skills.
- Add numbers. A good trick to make your resume for bank jobs brilliant is to add some concrete numbers that indicate your past accomplishments. Factual numbers will make a much better impression than empty words.
- Write a strong summary. The summary section is what can help you make the right impression in recruiting firms. Focus on the summary and make it truly strong. If you handle it, you will definitely get more interviews.
- Tailor your resume. Another effective trick is to tailor your resume to each specific position. This will help you attract the recruiter’s and employer’s attention and stand out from the crowd. Also, it will help you create a stronger connection with a particular company and show that you share its values.
Following these tips, you will create a good investment banking resume example that will help you land an interview with ease.
Choose the Best Format for an Investment Banking Resume
Unfortunately, there is no perfect, one-fits-all template for an investment banking resume. Basically, there are four main resume formats:
- Functional - this type of format makes emphasis on your skills and abilities than on your employment history.
- Chronological/Reverse Chronological - focuses more on work experience, keeping the skills secondary.
- Combination - it is a mix of functional and chronological formats.
- Targeted - this format implies writing a resume tailored to a specific job opening.
In fact, you can consider any of these formats depending on your objectives and preferences. However, our experts recommend sticking to a reverse-chronological format. It appears to be the most optimal format for a good investment banking resume example as it is easy to scan and understand and it places the right emphasis on your work experience and achievements.
Yet, your resume should be well-tailored to the desired position. Banking is a very extensive field. For example, a resume for an investment banker has to be different from an investment analyst resume and focus on different skills.
All in all, getting back to the best investment banking resume example format, here is a basic, but very efficient template you can use:
- Brief summary;
- Education;
- Employment background;
- Skills.
Write an Investment Banking Resume Summary or Summary Objective
To advance your job search and ensure that your application doesn’t get lost in a pile of others, you need a flawless investment banking analyst resume. One way to ensure that your resume is flawless is to get professional help. But, you can also do it yourself and still land an interview if you follow our tips.
Here is a complete investment banking resume template created by our experts with years of experience in the resume writing business:
Summary
A brief summary of your experience
Professional Experience
Company Name, Location (the latest place of work first)
Position, work period
- Main duties
- …
- …
- …
Company Name, Location
Position, work period
- Main duties
- …
- …
- …
Company Name, Location
Position, work period
- Main duties
- …
- …
- …
etc.
Education
School Name, Location
Degree
Honors: (if any)
Skills
- …
- …
- …
Following this sample investment banking resume template, you will be able to create a professional resume that highlights your level of qualification, main skills, and strengths. With such a resume, you should definitely attract the attention of pretty much any hiring manager. And with the rest of the tips from this article, you should be able to get employed with ease.
Describe Your Banking Experience
When writing resumes for banks, one section you should really focus on is your professional experience. Your employment history is the part that will attract the interest of a recruiter the most. This is the part of your resume that highlights your professionalism and makes you an in-demand applicant. Thus, to succeed, you have to ensure that you get it right.
The best resumes for banking list previous work experiences in reverse chronological order, starting from the latest place of work and going back to the early experiences. For every point, you should include:
- Company name;
- Location;
- Key duties;
- Accomplishments.
You can format it as a list or write a brief paragraph about each place of work. All in all, it should look like this:
US Bank, Seattle, Washington
2015 to Present
Senior Banker
- Managing the bank’s major accounts;
- Identifying client requirements;
- Liaise with key customers;
- And so on.
Put Your Education on Resume for Investment Banking
Another vital section in all banking resumes is education. Why do all banking resume samples should include an education section? Although today there are quite a few jobs that don’t have any education requirements, if you want to apply for an investment banking job, you need to have a degree.
Typically, entry-level investment banking jobs will require candidates to have at least a Bachelor’s degree. Respectively, if you want to land a senior management or banker role, you will need to hold a Master’s degree. In most cases, it is possible to grow from entry-level to senior position without an MA degree. But it’s only possible when you are already in the company.
Given that such jobs require a minimum of a BA degree, the education section is vital for all resumes for banking. It is this section that will show the company that you meet their minimum employee requirements. Besides, if your level of education is higher than the required minimum, it should give you a competitive advantage and make your resume stand out among other applications.
To specify your education level it is enough to name the school, obtained degree, and any honors that can play in your favor.
Put Skills on an Investment Banking Resume
After you share the information about your education and professional experience, you should emphasize your skills that will make you look like a good match for the desired position. When writing banking skills resume, the most important thing is to ensure that your skills match the requirements for the desired position. And, it is also important to combine soft and hard skills.
Here are the core skills to include:
- Teamwork
- Ability to work in a fast-paced environment
- Communication skills
- Knowledge of deal structuring and closing principals
- Strong research and analytical skills
- Proficiency in Microsoft Office products
- High level of organization
- Financial modeling skills
Another handy tip is to use the right keywords in your investment banking resume sample. Today, most hiring specialists use the applicant tracking systems (ATS) to do preliminary scanning of applications. This system is designed to notice certain keywords in your resume that indicate whether you are a good fit for a specific position. Thus, using keywords is important as it makes your resume easier to notice.
Here are some of the investment banking resume keywords to use:
- Analysis
- Research
- Study
- Report
- Financial modeling
- Profitability
- Industry
- Strategy
- Strategic direction
- Cost-cutting
- Industry research
- Competitor landscape
- Company profile
- Brand building
Add Contact Info to Your Resume
Finally, the last piece of information that should be included in all investment banking resumes is your contact info. Although it sounds like a pretty obvious thing to do, some job seekers do make this mistake in their resumes. And, needless to say, this is a fatal mistake.
After you make the right impression, you’ve got to give potential employers and recruiters a few contact options. After all, how will they be able to recruit you if there are no contact details?
What contact info should be there? Typically, regardless of whether it is an activities resume template or any other type of resume, you should provide the following basic details for contacting you:
- Applicant’s full name
- Street address
- City
- State
- Zipcode
- Phone number
- Email address
Apart from this, in the contact section, you can also add links to your personal website (if you have one) and your LinkedIn account.
Use Key Action Verbs
Although not everyone knows this, every good investment banking resume example should include certain words called “action words”. In a nutshell, action words are certain verbs that help you clearly communicate your experience and skills and, at the same time, make you stand out.
Here are some of the most effective resume keywords you can use:
- Accomplish
- Achieve
- Advise
- Allocate
- Analyze
- Assess
- Attain
- Brief
- Build
- Buy
- Calculate
- Captain
- Compete
- Communicate
- Cooperate
- Coordinate
- Create
- Deliver
- Enhance
- Establish
- Execute
- Expand
- Finance
- Forecast
- Function
- Gain
- Generate
- Hedge
- Integrate
- Leverage
- Manage
- Mandate
- Maximize
- Merge
- Minimize
- Mitigate
- Negotiate
- Optimize
- Predict
- Prevent
- Project
- Supervise
- Track
- Verify
Banker Resume Sample
When writing resumes for banks, regardless of the desired position, you will typically follow the same template as described earlier. However, though the overall look of resumes for different roles will be pretty similar, it does not mean that there is absolutely no difference.
If you are writing specifically an investment banker resume, you’ll want to have all the sections we talked about earlier, including a summary, work history, education, skills, and contact info.
A banking job requires high levels of dedication, attention to detail, and organization. However, these are only a few of the many traits that recruiters are looking for. Apart from that, it is a good idea to ensure that your banking resume sample includes the following skills:
- Excellent numeracy skills
- Strong communication skills (both written and verbal)
- Customer service
- Problem-solving
- Teamwork
- Ability to manage a team
- Leadership
- Strong time management and organization
- Analytical skills
- Research skills
- Ability to work under the pressure
These are some of the basic skills you are expected to have to land a banker job. Of course, there are even more skills that can benefit you. The key advice we can give you is to include all the skills that make you the right candidate for the chosen position.
Investment Banking Resume Example
If you are looking for a winning investment banking resume example, you can find some great samples on our website. To create a good resume yourself, you can also follow the template we shared with you in this post. The same format and content is optimal for different kinds of banking jobs.
Apart from the structure, you should pay special attention to your skills section. Here are the core things employers will be looking for:
- Communication
- Analytical thinking
- Resilience
- Innovation
- International outlook
- Confidence with numbers
- Leadership skills
- Time management
- Organization
Whether you are writing a finance internship resume or searching for financial modeling resume examples, here are the key takeaways that will help you make your resume shine:
- It has to pass the test of the ATS. As we mentioned earlier, this system is used to sort out piles of resumes to weed out the ones that don’t match the company’s requirements.
- It should be clear, concise, indicate your strongest points, and provide all the important information.
- It should be tailored to the specific needs and expectations of each particular company to which you send your application. This will help you make the right impression and show that you have exactly what each employer is seeking.