An MBA has historically been considered a passport to the glamour and riches of a high-finance career, but times are changing, says Professor Pablo Triana, director of the Centre for Advanced Finance at the Instituto de Empresa, in Madrid.

“These are interesting times when MBA [graduates] face real competition when it comes to investment banking, private equity and hedge-fund jobs. Before the emergence of the masters in finance the MBA faced no competition. Now a Harvard MBA could find [that] an Oxford masters in finance is hired ahead of them, and that hasn’t happened before,” Professor Triana says. “Now that elite institutions like Oxford and Princeton offer masters in finance, they will, without a doubt, steal finance jobs from MBAs.”

In the past decade there has been a proliferation of masters in finance (MiF) courses. These need to be distinguished from the growing number of masters in quantitative finance degrees – specialised technical courses – that prepare graduates for technical finance roles. The main competition for graduates from these quantitative courses is likely to be candidates with PhDs. Professor Triana says too that it is important to compare apples with apples. An MBA from a top business school is always likely to trump an MiF from a lower ranking school.

There is also the question of candidates’ backgrounds. Lara Berkowitz, the associate director for finance careers at London Business School, says that MiF graduates at the school may be offered more senior positions than MBA holders because they tend to have more work experience. But the roles that graduates of the two courses are hired into vary little – investment banking and sales and trading jobs are popular with both. “Investment banking is popular [for those with] a real passion for the markets and doing deals,” she says. But there is more to banking, Berkowitz says, pointing to a range of roles opening up to business school graduates, including jobs with a commercial, strategic or marketing focus.

Alan Morrison, the director of the MiF programme at Saïd Business School in Oxford, says that “an MBA and MiF are both reasonable routes into banking”, and that students need to choose whether to trade the breadth of an MBA for the specialist focus of an MiF. At Oxford about half the MiF graduates go into banking roles with a technical component. Many of the others go into the more traditional MBA world of corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. MiF students are also increasingly seeking internship experience, similar to their MBA counterparts. “This is an increasingly popular request from those applying early enough to do it before the course starts,” Dr Morrison says.

So, for a role you can bank on, it pays to weigh up your career aspirations against the type of degree and the investment in time and money you’re prepared to make. “The MBA may continue to be the safer bet – if you don’t get into investment banking you can try other things, such as consulting... but for those that are brave or visionary enough to do a specialist degree then the payout could be superior to an MBA,” Professor Triana concludes.

Next week: finance courses for nonfinance professionals

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