Lateral Hire Training for Investment Banks

Corporate Training

The client is one of Wall Street’s leading investment banks, with hundreds of new hires every year from around the world. However due to international visa issues, often a new hire’s start date falls outside the bank’s new analyst training program. This year a large number of new international analysts – 160 – had a delayed start date.

The client approached us for assistance delivering a lateral training program, but challenged us to devise an innovative solution that was both impactful and cost-effective, rather than deliver another full classroom training.

The Challenges

Level the Playing Field

As is to be expected from one of the world’s most prestigious investment banks, the client runs an extensive entry level training program for their new hires. The big challenge was to get new hires who joined late well trained just as effectively as their peers, but on a tighter budget. The lateral hires needed to be just as confident on the desk, but did not have the luxury of the usual two-week classroom training or direct interaction with trainers.

The Solution

Tailored to Format

Financial Edge is no stranger to leveraging technology to deliver training solutions. For this client, we put together a delayed hire program which mirrored the entry-level training program, but instead of being delivered live, we put the program into a series of 12 webinars, delivered through Felix, our proprietary on-demand learning and analytics platform. The webinars were run by 5 Financial Edge experts, and covered accounting, modelling, valuation and M&A and LBO analysis.

Additional Tools in Felix

Instead of just delivering the program through webinars, we expanded the offer to include a full Felix license for each of the new hires, giving them access to on-demand microlearning broken up into 4,000+ videos and across hundreds of topics and playlists. The subscription also includes Felix Live, a series of 160 live technical webinars that run each year, helping further flatten the forgetting curve, as well as help new hires and existing analysts alike sharpen their skills.

Online Classroom Experience

We gave the participants access to an online classroom page where they could download additional files and interact with each other to simulate the in-person classroom experience and build the comradery and community that’s such a crucial part of new hire programs.

The Impact

Value

Delivering the lateral hire program virtually provided the client a greatly enhanced offering at no extra cost.

Long-lasting

The new hires enjoyed their 12-week induction program, and also had access to a much larger and longer-lasting program of webinars and on-demand eLearning content.

Ongoing Support with Felix

Complete access to Felix provided the new hires the perfect tool for improving their confidence on the desk and developing as productive members of the deal team.