1. Short term career goals.
Though, the future is not fully predictable. I strongly believe good planning has positively affect peoples' lives; it encourages people to be focused, productive and successfully achieve their goals.For me, I grouped my goals into two categories; short and long term career goal. After completing the MSc Investment and Wealth Management program, my short termcareer goal is to find a position at one of the leading global trusted firms as a financial planner/advisor. I want to contribute what I have learned through education and to gain real life experience.While working, I am going to work hard on getting my CFP done.I expected to receive my CFP certificate by the end of 2018. Since financial planner is considered as service job, therefore, getting this CFP done early could positively impact my overall career (potentially backup the quality of my service). Moreover, completing this goal also led to achievement of my anothernon-career related short term goal. As I desire to be called and known as the youngest CFP, receiving this certification could put me in the better position in the career field.
To utilize my past experiences and valuable knowledges to the fullest, I want to create financial plan for each family members including myself. I do believe this is the most important starting point to make myself accountable and creditable among prospective clients and friends. After developing professional experience through career, I will revise and adjust the plan if I could implement it better than the previous plan. During my leisure time, I will also do the research on sharing my past experiences and professional knowledges from the work place and Imperial College to people who interested in this field.
2. challenges you think you will face in achieving these short term career goals and how you will overcome them.
To be a competitive applicant, I musthave a solid knowledge in Finance both academically and industrially. During the program, I will try my best to earn and develop broad arrays of skills. Moreover, I will also participate in extra-curricular. I personally believe balancing between academic interests and extra-curricular is necessary; it could potentially help me build resilient interpersonal skills, communication skills, along with precious connection where it increases my employment potential. One thing that I will feel grateful and appreciate is that Imperial Business School has well-prepared all the career events for their students. Therefore, completing this program potentially enrich my ability to work with the big firm.Substantially, I believe this has potential to make me standout and unique among other candidates. Due to the high competitiveness of this career, what most firms look for each candidate including: exceptional academic achievement, strong leadership skills, robust critical thinking and problem solving abilities, highly motivated self-starters, and successful collaboration and ability to work in diverse teams. Graduating from this program would prepare me well on this matters since it requires a lot of group works and researches, and practices.
I believe those exclusive elective courses I select would provide and prepare me to well-position career I am looking for. Furthermore, working and preparing for CFP exam simultaneouslymight be tough. However,I will strive for this by starting early; sparing my leisure time to self-study, catch up with current events, and at the same time making connection wherever I go. These are challenges I believe I will be facing any stage of the career path. Throughout the process, I will also obtain the SMART goals and evaluate my performance. Overall, I will be maintaining positive attitude towards all good and bad times throughout the road of success. I will learn from the mistake and implement those for better forthcoming outcomes. Moreover, I would love to volunteer for extra works if it helps me gain more experience.
3. Long term career goals.
As my career became progressive and constant, I will consider the second job. As stated above, my short term career goals serve as stepping-stones towards achieving my long-term career goals. After gaining real life and job experience, I will be able to see myself more clear. Therefore, I will grab all the opportunity I could to become expertise in this career. I separated my long-term career goals into three different perspectives. First, I want to become a wealth manager or hedge fund. At the same time, if things go well, I also want to create knowledgeable sources where I could share my successful life path with some fruitful tip I learned from my preceding mistakes; be a lecturer or special guest speaker for institution, or non-profit organization like TEDx. All in all, I want to motivate all kinds of people to consider financial planning as their own blood. I fond to show them how important it is. People get to live once, therefore, I do believe financial planning could help them to live the life that wanted. I know it may hard to change people perspective of financial planning since many people think it sounds tedious, difficult, and plus some people have a close-minded towards this. I want to help them by using in simple and self-explanatory terms.
As I regard this as one of my long-term career goals, I will strive to achieve this goal. I overheard many hilarious things about latte factor. Some people claims that stopping buying a latte could make individual a millionaire. In fact, this is totally misleading. I personally do not believe. In some cases, lacking of caffeine may reduce the work efficiency and productivity. Based on my opinion, I strongly believe, knowing individual goals and starting early make a big different. Many people choose to invest when they have a lot of money, in fact, the best time to invest the wealth is as soon as possible; the sooner the better. Seeing other people have a better understanding is considered as my life-goal honour.
4. What skills do you think are important in the career that interests you, how would you demonstrate that you have been developing these skills so far?
I define success as the combination of hard work, dreams, and dedication. There are many skills that require in my future career and I believe I have a strong potential to achieve both my short-long term career goals. Since my short-term goal career goal is to become a professional financial planner, my job is to make clients' goals reality or help them discover one. After doing some research online and watching some of the tips from well-known financial planner, I have learned that selecting the client process is very significant. Similar to what I learned from my audit class, there are many risks that professional practitionersshould take it under their considerations. It is impossible to accept all the clients' requests if there are many risks involved. Like Anderson, one of the big five public accounting firms, if they did a proper client selection, they may still keep their existence.
However, bad things happen and all we can do is learn and adapt those to better solution in the future. Skills that are interested me most is caring of clients and passion for this job. Many of advisors stated that if I have no passion to help others, this job might not fit for me. After spending years to find myself, I finally found myself. Luckily, I found my personal value earlier than others. For me, making other people happy is my happiness. Knowing that I could use my knowledge and advise to change peoples' lives and solve their problem always make me pleased andthankful for my life. I believe this factor could positively motivate me to do best in this career. Moreover, skills needed in my future career could be mostly found while I am taking the program including: analytical and interpersonal skills, communicating skills, teamwork skills, complex mathematics and programming skills, and organizational skills.
So far, I have been developing these skills throughout my life time especially during my undergraduate program such as teamwork skills, communication skills and program skills (excel and access). As studying in the U.S., I have beneficial through multi culture aspect of the classes. I found this very enjoyable since it was a melting pot where I learned different cultures and ideas which make me unique in a way. Due to the fact that I want to work in global firm, it helps me a lot interacting with diverse background coworkers. Additionally, by completing the MSc Innovation and Wealth Management from Imperial College of London could potentially put me into the superior place in this career. I will be able to use powerful financial tools that only offers in Imperial Business School such as: application of math lab to finance, Visual Basic, C++, and many up to date programs. Likewise, Imperial Business School has always done a good job in keeping in touch with big firms and alumnus. I truly believe these connection events along with exceptional career development department could potentially keep me in the right track of achieving my goals.
As I mentioned earlier, I will use my strength of having positive attitude towards these achievement. If I am lost during the way, I will take a step back and discuss with my mentors, but never give up till I reach my certain goals. Last but not least, I will regular attend visionary and strategic seminar to keep myself updated and motivated.