what's up everyone it's kenji here and in this video i'm gonna be sharing five career paths for
business students it obviously also applies to other majors that are somewhat related or
overlapped with business right so things like management finance or economics are probably
also going to be applicable to this video so the five that i've picked are management consulting
investment banking big tech obviously not the software engineering side but more the
business side of tech as well as accounting and then lastly we'll look at entrepreneurship
and basically i'm going to be rating these based on five stars and the three main metrics that
i'm going to be rating them by or number one the difficulty to get the job number
two the work life balance as in how many hours they have to work for this job and
then lastly the pay right and i'll be getting into actual numbers of how much each one pays
as well as bonuses and other things like that and obviously these are just five career paths they're
by no means the only ones it's just five that i thought would be handy to you as they're fairly
popular these days and if this video does well um i will try to make a part two so make sure
you hit that like and subscribe button so the first career path is management consulting and
if you don't know what management consulting is it's basically just helping big companies
improve their performance in exchange for a fee right so at its core it's just problem solving
and consultants are problem solvers in that sense and some of the examples of say
things that you might be assigned to do or your firm might be assigned to do are for instance
say bmw is considering entering a new market say i don't know the bicycle market then you might be
in charge of researching if the market's viable if it's something that's worth bmw moving into right
that's just an example obviously another one could be something like hey we see our employees
on facebook aren't very motivated is there a way to change the compensation scheme so that they're
going to be more motivated so you do research on hey is a bonus a good idea to put in here
are stock options a good idea are things like that right and some examples of the biggest management
consulting firms are mbb which stands for one's mckinsey the other one is bain and the other one's
bcg boston consulting group those are by far the three biggest ones there's obviously some some
other ones like oliver wyman or accenture and so on but i'll be focusing on these big three for now
all right so the first metric is work life balance and management consultants are known to work a lot
not as much as investment bankers which we'll get into in another section but they still put in a
good say 70 hours a week which is definitely a lot more than say your average 40 hour work week right
that said they also have to travel quite a bit in that maybe they spend a couple weeks in a in
a month outside their offices in a hotel somewhere basically because they're at their clients office
right so basically your client expects you to be there throughout the week which is why they have
to travel around so much now obviously this is changing with remote work and other things like
that but it's still fairly common for management consultants to travel so for those reasons we'll
give work-life balance a two-star for now as for the pay it obviously varies by location but
if you're looking at the big three mckinsey bcg and bain they will pay around a hundred
and ten thousand dollars a year if you're in one of the big us cities right so basically
90 000 would be the base salary you would have a sign-in bonus of around 5 000 and another 15
000 depending on how good your bonus is right in terms of performance but something along the lines
of 110 000 is not unrealistic to think of so it's definitely a lot of money and here's a chart kind
of comparing the different ones out there and here it's also worth noting that the usp is a lot more
than most other countries right like look at this chart here where it says that the uk consultant
made an average of 46 000 pounds which if you convert it to us dollars that's around 65 thousand
that said there's obviously cost of living tax other things like that that probably are the
reason for the differences but in order to compare well to other career options let's
break it down on a per hour basis instead of on an absolute basis right so let's say that they
work for 50 weeks a year so they get two weeks of holiday 50 weeks a year and as we said earlier
they work 70 hours a week 70 hours a week right so basically gives you around 31 dollars per hour as
a salary which i think is fairly reasonable so let's put a four star out of five for that now
in terms of difficulty management consulting is definitely very very hard to get into especially
the big three as i mentioned earlier mckenzie bcg and bain they're very very competitive to
get into they don't disclose acceptance rates but i'd say it's well below the five percent mark out
of the applicants that actually get the job right as for locations typically those locations that
don't just speak english so they have a local language like say tokyo or shanghai are probably
going to be a lot less competitive because not that many people speak both in japanese and
english or mandarin and english right as opposed to new york or london where you only really need
to speak one language right and the reason it's so competitive is because a lot of people want this
basically the job pays well the job leaves a lot of options open in that consulting is quite a
vague industry so you can obviously moving to other areas if you want to later on those are
the main reasons why it's so competitive and i'll leave this free resource in the description which
is basically going to give you a breakdown of all the necessary steps to get into management
consulting if that's the road you want to take so in terms of difficulty we'll give that a 5 star
alright so moving on to the second career path which is investment banking and if you don't
know what investment banking is at its core it's two main things number one is financing meaning
you help companies and governments raise money in the financial markets and then number two it
has to do with advisories so basically you help them out and you consult them on things related
to money so for instance hey how much money should you have in your balance sheet where
should you allocate your money other things like that are what people typically pay them for and
if that's not very clear still you can check out this other video that i made which is basically
walking through the differences between a commercial bank and an investment monk
and to give you some examples of investment banks the most renowned out there are known as
the bulge bracket which are basically the largest investment banks in the world so think like hsbc
morgan stanley goldman sachs jp morgan bank of america and so on and so forth there's also
some other more specialized one which specialized ones which are known as boutique investment banks
and these are centreview lazard and others which just basically specialize in one specific thing
now looking into the three main metrics when it comes to work-life balance to be honest there
isn't much of a work-life balance typically investment bankers work around 80 hours a week
which is even worse than management consultants and if you want to see the details of that i'll
put a video up here this is basically out of about my time at goldman sachs where i put in a good
80 hours a week more or less that also includes weekends and as for travel there's typically not
that much travel that's something fairly unusual in investment banking so for those reasons we'll
put the work-life balance at a one star in terms of pay it's definitely very high and hence why you
have to worry so much so typically it's around 85 000 as your base salary on top of that you get a
signing bonus of around 10 000 and you also get a performance bonus obviously dependent
on performance but it's usually around the 50 000 range so it gives you a total of around 145
000. as for whether that's a lot or not let's break it down on a per hour basis to see
so if you work for 80 hours a week for 50 weeks that gives you around 36 dollars per hour
obviously it doesn't sound quite as nice as 145 000 but nonetheless it's a lot of money so we'll
give it a 5 stars for now in terms of difficulty investment banking is definitely very very hard
to get into much like management consulting if you look at this fun article by business insider which
is called the 11 things that are harder to get into than harvard it does include goldman sachs
which is probably the most sought after investment bank and it has an acceptance rate of three
percent now i'd say most other investment banks aren't quite as low but they're still between
the three and five percent mark right so for those reasons for difficulty we'll give that five stars
and i'll leave another free resource in the description for investment banking i found this
one on the internet and it basically goes through all of the different things that you need to know
to recruit for an investment all the way from what is an investment to the types of interviews there
are out there so i think it might be useful to you guys all right so next up we have big tech
and obviously as business students you're probably not going to be working as software engineers but
rather more on the business side of tech right so things like account management business
development finance accounting marketing other things along those lines right and as for examples
i mean i don't think i need to give too many but the big five or google amazon apple microsoft and
facebook right those are regarded as the big five but obviously there's other big tech companies
that you probably use on your day-to-day like snapchat or spotify others along those lines right
so looking into the metrics when it comes to work-life balance it's actually pretty good
typically it sits around 40 to 60 hours that's at least based on my experience at amazon as well as
some some of my other colleagues working on google and places like that so it's pretty good i'd say
in that sense usually on weekends you don't have to work unless you you've messed up or something
so for those reasons also the dress code usually there's no dress code the offices are fairly
fancy because they're tech offices um sometimes the food's even free so for those reasons we'll
give it a five star for work-life balance so the pay package is a bit confusing in tech and
here's why it basically has three main areas to it the first one is the base salary which
in the big cities say in new york san francisco seattle it's around 80 000 then secondly you get
what's called the signing bonus which is actually split into two two years which is i don't know
why it's a bit confusing uh basically it's around 25 000 for a two years so 12.5 for one year right
and then in addition to that you have shares but obviously the shares are not fixed in value right
they go up and down but it's typically around the 50 000 mark that said you don't actually get the
shares on your day one instead they have what's called a vesting period which essentially means
that you can only get them after you've worked for a set period of time at the company right
so yeah even more confusing but anyways let's just put a hundred thousand as your year one salary for
now and basically if you're working 50 hours a week say that's the average of the 40 hours
and 60 that we've said before and then you work for 50 hours that probably gives you around the
40 mark per hour right which on a relative basis is definitely a lot better than investment banking
and management consulting so we'll put that a five star for now in terms of difficulty
obviously software engineering is very difficult to get into at a big tech firm but on the other
hand for more business oriented roles the truth is that there's just not that much information on it
i even worked at amazon myself and i wasn't able to gather much information about it so um yeah i'm
just gonna not be able to give you much data on this so we'll just put a three star in terms of
difficulty for now all right so the fourth career option is accounting and if you don't know what
accounting is it's basically the way for a company to maintain accurate records of their financial
position so if they want to look at things like hey how much profit did we make last year or hey
um how much do we have in sales how much do we owe the bank again other questions like that can
easily be solved with accounting right so role of an accountant is basically two ways the first one
is to find these figures so calculate them that's accounting and then the other one is auditing
which is basically verifying that these accounts are actually true and that they make sense right
so i personally worked at pwc as an intern as an auditor and basically they would send me out
to a client say to the volkswagen group with my team obviously and we would get into their
finance team and start to look at their accounting rates so if everything makes sense or not and then
we would create what's called an audi report and based on that we would certify that their accounts
are correct or their incorrect rate so when you see big accounting scandals like those of wirecard
that we saw recently in germany that's basically got to do with accounting and auditing now some
examples of the big accounting firms are known as the big four which stand for pwc ey kpmg and
deloitte those are a big four um they basically have offices really all around the world if you
uh live in a decent size city odds are they're going to be there and they have around 200
000 to 300 000 employees so they're really really massive and they also have some other
departments not just accounting right they also do things like consulting they do things like
legal services transactions and other things like that now when it comes to work-life balance i'd
say it's fairly similar to big tech in that they probably work around 40 to 60-hour weeks
it does get somewhat busy during say january to to march during that spring season and the reasons
that most companies are closing their accounts and they're getting ready to file taxes and things
like that right but overall uh the pricks are not quite as good as big tech in that you still have
to go in a suit because you're meeting clients um the office is typically you know as cool or as
fancy if you will as that of a tech firm but i'll still give it out of work-life balance let's say
a four-star is fairly reasonable so for the pay in the big u.s cities like new york and san francisco
there's usually two main parts to it the first one is the base salary which is usually around
the sixty thousand dollar mark and then you have the bonus which obviously depends on performance
right but it's usually on the around the five thousand dollar mark so it's 65 000 in total
if we put that on a relative basis to compare to the other ones let's say they work for 50
hours a week and they work for 50 weeks that probably leaves you around 26 dollars per hour
which is not bad as in you're probably not a star from that but at the same time it's nowhere near
some of the other industries right so for those reasons we'll give it a three star rating
now in terms of difficulty it's nowhere near as competitive as investment banking or management
consulting and basically the reasons that a lot of people think that accounting is boring i'm not
saying that's my case i'm not getting into that but yeah a lot of people think that it's boring
and hence why it's not as competitive right so basically if you have a good degree and you have
good grades odds are you'll at least get to the interview stage so for those reasons when it comes
to difficulty to getting the job we'll give it a two star all right so the last option in this
video is entrepreneurship and that's basically just starting your own business right i don't
think i need to give many examples but some of the more recent startups that went mainstream
include doordash that was founded in 2013 what is there there's robin hood also founded in 2013
as well as wework which is founded in 2010. so looking at the three main metrics when it comes
to work-life balance the reality is that as an entrepreneur you're probably gonna have to work
a lot a lot more than you would in your regular job at least if you want your business to do well
right um when looking at the successful companies out there most of the founders said they did work
over 80 hours a week weekends inclusive and at the end of the day you're only giving yourself
an advantage if you work longer right so for those reasons um assuming that you want your business
to do well we'll put the work hours of five stars as for pay it's hard to say most businesses to be
honest end up failing and so they obviously don't generate any money right which is why they fail
but on the other hand if you look at the forbes list most of the billionaires up there are company
founders i'm not saying that your company is going to get to that level but there is the
upside potential that say your regular job doesn't have right so for pay for now i'm just gonna put
two stars as it's probably more likely that it goes uh bankrupt or that your business fails as
opposed to it say becoming getting on the first list right and lastly when it comes to difficulty
entrepreneurship is one star mainly because you don't need the permission from anyone to do it um
it's not like you need to get into an interview or anything like that you just go ahead and get
started now i'm not saying that the business is gonna do well obviously that depends on other
factors but to start it you don't really need anything so yeah those are five career options
for business graduates um i do realize that for salaries it's a bit of a rough guide in that if
you live in other cities that are not say the big ones in the us they're probably going to pay you a
bit less especially because the cost of living is going to be less right and the same applies if you
live abroad probably the us pays the most compared to other european cities or cities in asia right
and also i do want to mention that if there's any inaccuracies feel free to point them out
in the comments right i'll try to pin them if i think it's correct obviously i want the
best information to be out there for you guys and lastly i realized that most of the things that i
analyzed are more numbers oriented if you will so if you like me to do more letters oriented type of
career options for business students so those like that relate to say marketing hr
advertising other things like that do hit that like and subscribe if the video does
well i'll consider doing it so hope you found it useful and i'll hopefully catch on the next one