Resources

Professional Accreditations

CFA Institute

The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation is the gold standard for the financial industry. It is governed by the CFA Institute, which continuously updates the curriculum to keep it relevant and applicable. It requires successful passing of three consecutive levels of fairly comprehensive and difficult exams. To carry the designation, one also has to have at least four years of relevant professional experience. As an ambitious Finance undergraduate, one can pursue the Level 1 exam during Senior year.

They also offer the Investment Foundation Program which is an excellent, free, introductory course introducing students to the various aspects of the investment management industry.

The third program they offer is the Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM®). This is a fairly specialized, technical, niche program, not recommended for the early years in your career.

All of their programs cost money, and there are third parties who offer study programs to prepare you for the tests (especially the CFA), which also cost money but essentially summarize the large amount of content down to more digestible learning units. Two to consider are:

• Schweser/Kaplan
• Wiley's

Note that sometimes they have free resources for you to tap into. For example, Schweser/Kaplan offered free 'MasterClasses' for the Level 1 curriculum which are nine 2-hour videos.

Corporate Finance Institute

The Corporate Finance Institute offers a series of online education resources that are practical and tailored to develop skills for a career start in corporate finance or investment management. They offer a series of free courses covering the absolute essentials, such as Excel, analysis of financial statements, intro to corporate finance and economics, and others.

If you are a student at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, please use this link to sign up and get access to the free courses. For anyone else, the free courses can be found here.

They also offer certifications that are based on taking numerous courses they have available on their website. The quality of their modules is solid and allows for completely independent and self-paced study. They do cost money but provide you with professionally relevant education and a certificate that has resume value. Currently they offer four certifications, the Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst Certification, the Certified Banking & Credit Analyst, the Capital Markets and Securities Analyst, and the Business Intelligence and Data Analyst.

There are many other accreditation to pursue, such as the CFP for financial planners, the Series X exams administered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Industry (FINRA) that are applicable to specific professions in the financial industry. It's best to take those based on your actual job you will have after you graduate. Some of those will be required and some will be beneficial to earn while being on the job for a couple of years.