What Are the Best Financial Apprenticeships To Choose Right Now?
With an apprenticeship, you can work and learn simultaneously. While working and pursuing a professional qualification, you will develop your experience and skills. You’ll work for an employer and pursue your education on-campus, online, or both.
If you’re wanting to go into financial services areas such as asset/wealth management, risk & compliance, investment banking, data analysis, and financial planning, then a financial apprenticeship is certainly an excellent way to get into those industries.
This article will highlight some of the top and most popular financial apprenticeships available today, as well as the duties performed in these apprenticeships.
Asset and Wealth Management
Asset and wealth managers are employed by companies in the financial services industry that carry out investment management, trading, and reporting tasks in the operational and administrative domains. These businesses can conduct transactions ranging in value from a few hundred pounds to hundreds of millions of pounds.
With a local and international client base of institutional and retail clients, including private individuals, small enterprises, collective investment schemes, pension funds, charities, corporations, and governments, the support system backing these activities is extensive and diverse.
In a wealth management apprenticeship, at the lower levels you will usually accomplish basic administrative tasks such as filing, photocopying, taking calls and emails, processing payments, and note-taking. In the later levels, you’ll take on responsibilities normally held by wealth managers, such as counselling customers on financial goods and services, purchasing and selling shares on the client’s behalf, managing investments, and providing planning services.
Compliance and Risk Management
The financial services sector is heavily regulated and constantly changing. Risk and compliance are important components of the financial services industry that guarantee the company will adhere to legal and regulatory regulations.
In order to reconcile obtaining the right customer outcomes while making sure the organisation complies with this diverse set of standards, risk officers provide proactive support and guidance to the relevant areas of business.
As there may be disagreements between the business and the risk and compliance function over the proper course of action, the position will demand high ethical standards, as well as effective communication and persuasive abilities. It will be necessary to have solid background understanding of risk and compliance frameworks (as training is provided this not necessarily a strict requirement), policies, and processes. Depending on the organisation, the role could include risk management, compliance management, or a combination of both.
Data Analysis
The main responsibility of a data analyst in finance is to gather, arrange, and analyse data in order to offer corporate insight. Data management, cleaning, simplification, and collection, as well as a variety of analytical studies on the data, are also typical tasks for data analysts. They collaborate on a number of initiatives and offer technical data answers to a variety of stakeholder and client challenges.
Some other responsibilities of financial data analysts include:
– Using the methods and instruments for data analysis, data visualisation, and presentation.
– Identify, collect, and migrate data between internal and external systems.
– Interpret and connect various data sets as needed.
– Gather and consolidate data from various sources.
What Will a Financial Apprenticeship Give You?
Almost all finance apprenticeships are organised alongside specialist work-based training, in addition to the foot in the door that comes with experience in the industry.
This practical preparation leading to recognised professional qualifications and vocational certificates can be critical if you want to be fully qualified in the field of finance.
Employers expect apprentices to be committed to a future career in a specific section of financial industries, or at least have some idea of what direction they want to go in and will provide you with an accelerated path to achieving your desired vocation.
In many instances, starting your finance career as an apprentice will provide you with the abilities and training you need to potentially advance faster up the ladder than a graduate, while gaining technical experience in your desired career.