Career conversations: Expand your horizons in finance and investment

I loved working with numbers, playing with numbers, toying around with it. Being in finance has helped me put figures to economic theories. I am Janice Dibia, I'm an Associate in the Structured Products Team at FBNQuest Capital.

Before I started working, I had no idea of what exactly finance entailed. School gives you the foundation you need for finance. And finance is applying what you've learnt from economics into the real world.

The thing I love most about investment banking was working with numbers. There's so much information that you have to take into consideration, create assumptions around these numbers to get to your target goal.  

Why I got interested in asset management was because of CFA (Program). It was because I have read something and it caught my interest and I was like, okay, I want to do this. That's why I made the shift from investment banking to asset management.  

So the CFA® Program honestly helps to expand people's horizons regarding finance. CFA® has conditioned my mind in such a way that I am reading different articles, different research reports, and I'm able to put all that different pieces of information together to form an investment strategy.  

So that's my picture. My picture is the investment strategy and then all the news articles I'm reading, these are my puzzle pieces. I was fortunate enough to have a couple colleagues who were already CFA® Charterholders. Just one random day in office, I see the equity book and I start flipping through the pages and just seeing the amount of knowledge, and just that helps me in my career and how I can apply that to my everyday work.

For me with the CFA Program, I was doing it more so because it was just a lot that could help you in your career even just as an individual. People have different strategies. For me, I want to be great at my job. I was determined to learn. I studied more at night so it will be after work. It wasn't easy at all, but it's doable as long as you're determined.  

For aspiring professionals, I'll say it's a great network to have, people all over the world are doing this CFA Program. There's no restriction on age, there's no restriction on the color of your skin. Everyone has access to it and so the network is global.

And it means I gained, I become a CFA® Charterholder at the end of the journey. And I have definitely used my knowledge I've gained while studying from CFA (Program)like learning about ethics, I have definitely applied all of that into all my three different careers.