How to get a banking job: 14 routes in
Getting a job in an investment bank will very likely be the most difficult thing you do in your entire life.
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No, we’re not joking. Goldman Sachs’ internship has an acceptance rate of just 0.7%, on par with peers such as JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Getting a job on the buy-side is even harder: Citadel has an acceptance rate of just 0.4% and Blackstone an acceptance rate of just 0.2%, according to Business Insider.
Your life before finance is nothing in comparison. Did you get into Oxford? Bah - an acceptance rate of 14% is a doozy. How about Harvard? A 4% acceptance rate; frankly decadent.
If you want to get that job, you will need to work very hard, exhaust every opportunity you have, and really – really, genuinely – be a little bit lucky. You have more options than you realise – and these are what they are.
Get into banking by doing a degree apprenticeship
The absolute earliest you can get a job in an investment bank is when you’re applying for university.
Degree apprenticeships – during which you’re employed by the bank while you’re studying – only exist in the UK, and they’re insanely competitive to get into: one program participant in 2023 told us that there were over 4,000 applicants to 28-degree apprenticeship roles at his bank last year, an acceptance rate of less than 0.7%. That’s on par with Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan’s “normal” internship acceptance rates.
It might be worth doing a degree internship though, even if you have to start preparing for a banking job at age 17. At the end of your four-year course, you have years of part-time experience, much better finances than your average university graduate, and a graduate offer to return to the firm as a full-time employee.
Degree apprenticeships have grown in popularity in recent years. Goldman Sachs, for example, launched its first one in London in 2016, and it expanded the program in October last year, announcing a partnership with the University of Warwick in Birmingham. The firm offers degree apprenticeships in FICC and equities, engineering, and operations in London, as well as digital & technology solutions in Birmingham.
A number of banks offer degree apprenticeships. Aside from Goldman, they are also offered by JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Santander.
Get a banking internship as an undergraduate and convert it
Summer internships are the most typical way to get a job in an investment bank, be it a front- or back-office job.
Among summer internships, the most numerous are summer analyst programs, which are meant for university/college students to do in their penultimate year of undergraduate study. Other types exist, and we’ll talk about them later, but it’s the summer analyst programs that are the gold standard of bank recruitment.
If you’re an undergraduate right now, most of your energy should be going into applying for these and getting into these.
Be warned, however – they are very competitive. The 0.7% figure in the introduction to this article is mostly comprised of summer internship applications. Data from UK-based student application Trackr suggested in April that the average student who received an internship offer from an investment bank made over 100 applications on average.
What can help improve your odds? Going to the right university, for one. Playing the right kind of sport. Having a bomb CV/resume. Writing a fire cover letter. And – especially if you’re pursuing a career in Europe – getting a spring internship or two under your belt.
Spring internships are week-long taster sessions in your first year of university that, hopefully, can lead to receiving an offer to join a bank for a second-year summer internship, although not all banks offer this. They’re extremely important. Some banks offer similar “sophomore” internships in the US, but those are going out of fashion, as they are/were mostly used for diversity recruitment.
Get a banking internship as a postgraduate and convert it
If you don't get into a summer analyst programme while you're at university, you can try when you've graduated. But this is a controversial topic.
If they don't get a job in a bank or financial services firm while at university, most students aspiring for a career in finance either try to get a masters in finance degree or a masters in financial engineering (MFE). It's worth noting, however, that doing a master’s degree (no matter that kind) still only gets you a summer analyst internship. You will be at the bottom of the bank’s hierarchy. Therefore, what you’re really doing is paying five or six figures and spending an extra one or two years to get an opportunity that you should have gotten well before.
Additionally, not all master’s in finance degrees are made equal. Former careers coach Mark Ross told us last year that a lot of degrees are “ripping off candidates” and “need to be shut down”. Many graduates of these programs say that they feel like their employment prospects were misrepresented to them, and that they’re unhappy with the impact their masters degree had on their careers.
Masters in financial engineering degrees are more mathematical and designed for quantitative careers. The gold standard is the one offered by Baruch College in New York, where the MFE can cost as little as $29k (if you're a New York State resident) and has a $217k median compensation for first-year graduates.
If you don't want to do an expensive masters, careers coach and former Morgan Stanley & Goldman Sachs intern Brian Landeros says that you can “buy time” by delaying your graduation.
That doesn’t mean failing exams or modules or whatever else – you can just delay the graduation date. The reason for that is simple: banks require you to have a graduation date no later or earlier than a certain time period to apply for an opportunity. If you can delay your graduation date, you can apply for next year’s internships. That might be better (and cheaper) than doing a master’s degree.
Get a banking internship as an MBA and convert it
Doing a two-year masters in business administration (MBA) and getting an internship as a summer associate during it was once the gold standard of getting an investment banking job.
Although the route is not as popular as it used to be, there are still opportunities to get on a summer associate internship during your MBA, and converting that into a full-time job in the same way as if you were an undergraduate student.
And yes, it’s summer associate, not analyst. One of the big benefits of doing an MBA over other ways into banking is that you get to jump up the ladder a bit. But the biggest benefit is that you get to skip the abysmal work-life balance that analysts suffer - because you usually need a few years’ work experience to do an MBA, don’t consider it a way to start climbing the ladder earlier in life.
Like master’s degrees, not all MBAs are made equal. Banks are just as picky with who they hire from MBA programs as they are from undergrad ones, and there’s very much a hierarchy of top business schools that they recruit from.
Another benefit to starting your banking career with an MBA is that associates are better paid than analysts. A top MBA can lead to an investment banking job that pays up to $350k in starting salary (although the median is usually around $175k). That's much higher than an analyst, who typically earns around $110k - $120k in salary their first year. Bonuses for associates are generally more generous, too.
Get a banking internship as a PhD and convert it
More studying? Well, if you’re this far down the list, you’ve already missed undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA opportunities. What’s a few more years of studying to you? Besides, PhD holders are well-appreciated by banks, who itch for them to join their quantitative research teams.
For example, Goldman Sachs is looking for a number of people to join its quant strats (sales & trading) team as summer associates in London.
Citi is also currently looking for a lot of PhDs in various roles. One of the roles, an AVP in risk decision model development, is particularly curious – it notes that it’s either looking for seven years of experience, “or PhD degree in statistics, economics, or equivalent experience.” A PhD can jump a few more rungs up the banking ladder than a plain old MBA could.
Other banks have more interesting uses for PhDs. JPMorgan has a famous quantum computing team, and it hires a lot of PhDs for it, paying them salaries of up to $260k.
Not all quantitative positions requite PhDs, however. Jane Street, the electronic trading firm par excellence, does not exclusively hire PhDs – in fact, it mostly does not. “PhD or other research experience is a plus,” the firm wrote in a job opening for a quantitative researcher. “But ultimately, we’re more interested in how you think and learn, than what you currently know.”
Get a banking internship after you graduate
Okay, you might be starting to get desperate now. You should be: if you’ve done an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, an MBA, and a PhD, congratulations: you’re the best-qualified person who still can’t get into banking alive today.
But let's roll the clocks back a bit. If you're graduated from your bachelors and masters degrees (and haven't committed to an MBA or PhD), two options exist for you to get that all-important internship: graduate schemes and off-cycle internships. A graduate scheme without prior internship experience is pretty much impossible, but off-cycle internships are still an option.
Off-cycle are longer (3 to 12 months long at UBS, for example) internships working as an analyst. You get some training, and then you're basically a full-time analyst who isn't there full-time. Off-cycle internships have had a bad rap over the years, being seen as cheap and disposable labour that was treated rather poorly. That’s less so the case these days: in fact, one Goldman Sachs off-cycle research intern in London received a credit in a research note alongside his senior colleagues. We talk more about off-cycle internships here.
Get a job in banking by joining the army
Admittedly a bit of an insane step to take for the sake of any internship, and probably one your mother would disapprove of, but there are plenty of examples of banks having specific outreach schemes for military veterans that you can apply to.
Most opportunities for veterans are in the US. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs are all known to have special programs for military personnel transitioning into the private sector, as does Barclays (in the USA). Some banks, including JPMorgan, also have EMEA opportunities for veterans.
One of the most famous veterans recently in finance was Leo Lukenas. A former green beret and Bank of America associate, Lukenas died of an "acute coronary artery thrombus," during a period in which he was allegedly working 120-hour weeks. His twin brother, Les Lukenas, who was also a green beret, was hired by Goldman Sachs after his brother's passing.
Start the CFA program
A bit of a hardcore option given the workload, but if you’re already in an established career, doing at least the CFA Level I will help show recruiters and banks that you’re serious about finance, as well as teach you some of the basic concepts that should apply directly to your future work.
Doing a CFA is particularly useful for international students or professionals seeking to move into a finance career, due to its perceived value to Western institutions. Many students also do the CFA Level I during their university years as social proof, too.
The downside (or upside, to an employer) of the CFA is that you do actually have to work for it - it is more than possible to fail any of the three stages. CFA Institute indicates that the pass rates for Levels I, II, and III were around 43%, 42%, and 50% respectively in the latest testing period available (November 2025).
Get a job in banking by coming in through accounting
Getting into banking via accounting takes a very long time, courtesy of all those years of extra studying you also have to do for the ACA/ACCA/etc.
Accountants also tend to be a bit of a desperate pick for banks. They’re usually brought in when dealmaking is booming to work on what seems like an endless supply of business. Alas, dealmaking is not exactly booming at the moment – not the way it was in 2021, at least.
The most famous example of an accountant who succeeded in banking is probably Julian Salisbury, former chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (and now co-President and co-CIO of asset management firm Sixth Street), who joined Goldman from KPMG.
Get a job in banking by becoming a lawyer
Law isn’t as popular an entry point as it used to be, but it definitely has at least one significant previous example of success – former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyds Blankfein, who left law to join a trading firm that was a subsidiary of Goldman’s as a trader. The 80s were a very different time compared to now, though.
Get a job in banking through consulting
Management consulting is probably the best-positioned way to transition from a different industry into banking. Bankers and consultants tend to be very similar characters in terms of education, work ethics, and so on. Your field of expertise as a consultant also matters – transitioning from regulatory implementation to compliance, for instance, is quite straightforward.
There’s also a veritable hall of fame for people that reached the highest levels of banking despite their backgrounds in consulting. The former CEOs of Credit Suisse, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, and Commerzbank were all ex-McKinsey partners at one point: the present CEO of Citi, Jane Fraser, was also a partner at the firm earlier in her career.
Get a job in equity research through something entirely unrelated
Equity research isn’t strictly investment banking, but our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report showed that they’re doing very well for themselves in terms of both pay and work-life balance. Given their more relaxed work schedules, the average bank researcher earned as much money per hour worked as some investment banking teams.
Breaking into equity research is often done by someone already in the industry they wish to cover. Going from a medical career into covering healthcare equities is a tale as old as time, for instance.
Get a job in banking by sending an email
Cold emails are definitely not what they used to be. A running joke these days is that boomers like to recommend youngsters walk into a potential workplace, ask to speak to the owner, “make eye contact and give a firm handshake,” and boom, you have a job. Well, that doesn’t quite do it these days (not for investment banking, at least). And neither does cold emailing.
That being said, if you’re this far down the list, what do you have to lose but your pride? And besides, a low chance is not no chance.
Get a job in banking because your uncle has one
If you can benefit from nepotism, you don’t need our advice on how to dabble in it. And we don’t encourage such a thing, obviously.
Nepotism has always been prevalent in finance, despite rather consistent efforts to eradicate it over the years. One person in investment management told us earlier this year that "every firm" for which he had worked us was nepotistic to some degree, based on both the relatives of key executives and key clients.
Brian Landeros noted that, when he was doing his internships, he was surrounded by "rich Latin Americans, a member of the British nobility, and the son of Kenyan royalty." That's not some bizarre intern class either, believe it or not. Landeros generally recommends avoiding discussing your socioeconomic background, unless you're from the same privileged background as others.
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