Introduction
The mission statement of the college is to Produce career-ready, global business leaders through hands on discovery and application. In this document, I test to see how the finance faculty serves the mission.
To be clear, the mission statement is vague. For example, I struggle to imagine that a fresh undergraduate is a global business leader. This is not a critique of CalPoly; I struggle to imagine that a fresh undergraduate at Stanford is a global business leader as well. But I understand the spirit. I think it means OCOB produces career-ready undergraduates with global ambitions and leadership skills. To operationalize this concept, I think the mission means that OCOB produces undergraduates who qualify for “good jobs” — these jobs pay more than $65,000 per year.1
To select “good jobs”, I choose four keywords:
I chose the four keywords based on the required courses and from informal conversations with other students. Using the four keywords, I scrape indeed.com.
Exploratory data analysis
I scrape using the rvest package in R. First, using the keyword “portfolio manager”, I look for jobs with a minimum salary of $65,000 in California. I also ensure that the jobs are entry level full-time jobs. See the example. Using the counter, for these keywords, I can scrape 99 pages. I do the same for the other three keywords. I scraped 5964 listings. But maybe some listings are the same for each keyword. Then, I filter out duplicates and am left with 3764. For each listing, I got the title, location, company, summary and description of the job.
| X | title | company | location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Financial Analyst, Revenue Planning Team | Indeed | Austin, TX |
| 2 | Virtual HBO Corporate Finance Intern, Summer 2021 | HBO | New York, NY |
| 3 | Associate - Finance & Corporate Development | California Cryobank LLC | Los Angeles, CA |
Consider the first listing. Ironically, a company named indeed is looking for a finance analyst in Austin, Texas. The second listing is more interesting. Even though I filtered for full-time jobs, the second listing by HBO is seeking an intern in New York. Note that the second listing may be a remote job.
What are the most frequent job-titles?
Figure 1: This plot shows the most frequent key words in the job title
Figure 1 shows that the being an analyst is the most common title that an undergraduate can get. In fact, 31% of all jobs are analyst positions.
Where are the jobs?
Figure 2: This plot shows the location of most of the jobs
Figure 2 is interesting. Most finance students I speak to want to stay in California. But, Figure 2 shows that their choice may be sub-optimal. After all, most of the jobs are in New York and east coast. Geographic constraints matter to access success.
What does the job description say?
What are the responsibilities?
Figure 3: This plot shows the most correlated words with responsibilities
Figure 3 is the most shocking. Contrary to my belief, technical skills are not the most sought after. Most of the jobs require good written and oral communication. Most jobs are also team oriented.
What does an analyst do?
Figure 4: This plot shows the most correlated words with analyst
Figure 4 shows the most correlated words with analyst. By far, the most correlated term is excel — Microsoft Excel. With excel, the analyst can report, research, support, invest and analyze.
What about investment banking?
This figure gives a word cloud of the most correlated words with the keyword “investment”. The size of the font maps to correlation. So, for example, the most correlated word with investment is banking. Again, communication and excel comes are pivotal skills.
Conclusion
In this memo, I analyze finance jobs in order to do proper assessment. Upon first inspection, findings shocked me, but after speaking with employers, the findings seem reasonable. There are two key implications:
Communication: No matter what the keyword, good communication was the most important.
Excel: In the age of programming, most jobs require excel — not Python or other programming skills. That said, with excel, students can research, report and analyze. That said, I think that programming skills are pivotal for the future and perhaps I need to search for other keywords.
I choose the $65,000 number arbitrarily. Note that this salary limit may not be appropriate everywhere. In San francisco, for example, I do not think that a salary of $65,000 is enough.↩︎