The Fund Management & Administration Course at NYP

Hi guys, let's get back to the topic of further education. I am responding to one of my readers AD who is interested in doing the Fund Management & Administration Course (which I shall abbreviate as FMAC) at NYP and well, I read the online prospectus for the course and as someone who has worked in this industry, I am left feeling quite cynical after what I have seen. You see, it is pretty clear to me that the prospectus was written by someone at the Corporate Communications department at NYP - now don't get me wrong, they are clearly a very nice bunch of people who are very eloquent and very good at putting together marketing documents and dealing with everyone from the media to the press: it is their job to make NYP look good to the world. So whilst they have written a very professional looking prospectus for the FMAC course, I am shaking my head because it is just so incredibly far removed from reality. Speaking as someone who has actually worked in the fund management industry, please allow me to cut through the marketing spiel and give you a few hard facts about trying to get your dream job in the fund management industry.

Do you want to work in fund management?

Now a lot of people talk about getting a job in banking but this is a huge sector and fund management is a very specific branch within the world of banking. Now fund managers are the rock stars of the banking world: in a nutshell, they take a large pool of assets and make strategic investment decisions that will get you a very good return on your investment (in return for a small fee). Good fund managers can outperform the market, so if you are frustrated by the low interest rates in the bank and don't want to take risks on the stock market, investing in a fund that has a very good track record is a sound investment decision. However, there are risks involved and the value of the fund can go up or down, depending on whether the fund manager has made good decisions. Those fund managers who know how to make the right investment decisions even during challenging economic circumstances are highly rewarded for their insight and thus are extremely highly paid. It is not just the money that attracts people to this industry, it is also the ego: some people have had some success in managing their personal portfolio and have made wise investment decisions, thus they believe they can do that for others and be handsomely paid for that. There has been a lot of positive publicity for this course in the local press and the main premise for the FMAC programme at NYP is the fact that Singapore is a major Asian fund management hub and there is a lack of local talent to do the jobs in this industry - what the articles do not say is that a lot of the lucrative jobs created in this industry are going to foreigners, not locals and hopefully this course would help redress that balance. But it won't. Allow me to explain why.

Firstly, you have to overcome prejudice and snobbery in the industry. The fact is that many people in the industry have come from the top universities in the world and the fund management companies continue to recruit from these top universities. If you are from a second-tier university that is not very near the top end of the league tables, then your application will be ignored (but not before the evil gatekeeper has a good laugh at how you have this 癞蛤蟆想吃天鹅肉 attitude in even daring to apply in the first place.)  These companies want to attract the brightest, smartest talents to their teams and they don't really care what you studied at university, the fact that you are smart enough to get into one of the top universities in the world is good enough evidence for them that you are of the right caliber. So yes, they could recruit someone from say Oxford university with an engineering degree - this engineering graduate may know absolutely nothing about finance on the day he starts work, but that's fine, the company is more than willing to spend time training him and teach him everything he needs to do in order to do the job he is recruited for. In short, no, they do not expect you to hit the ground running on day one, you just need to be quite clever and a really fast learner.

Do you understand the job application process in this industry?

Secondly, it doesn't help that the level of entry for this course is painfully low - you can enroll in this course directly from your O levels without straight As and that is not a popular route even amongst the Singaporean students who have their sights set on a career in fund management. The more traditional route would be to go to one of the world's top universities like Oxford or Cambridge, get a degree (any degree) there just to overcome the snobbery in the industry and be accepted by the elite. NYP simply doesn't scream "elite" to the people in the industry, at best, the image I get of NYP (or any of the Singaporean polys) is that is it a rather decent alternative for those who cannot get into a respectable local university and don't want to waste good money going to a shitty second-tier university in the West. I'm sure the people at NYP will argue that the course content is very good and will prepare the students for jobs in the industry; but that still does nothing to overcome the prejudices and snobbery in the industry. Without a good university degree, it is going to be very hard to get past the gatekeepers in this industry and you will be up against many graduates from very good universities in this industry.

Now NYP makes a big deal about the six-month paid internships for selected students in the course - I have to say, that is very useful indeed. Getting an internship with State Street is probably far more useful than the diploma itself because it gives you a valuable opportunity to prove yourself to a potential employer. It is all about getting your foot in the door but even if you do get your foot in the door, there is no guarantee that you will impress State Street enough to secure a job upon graduation. There is a huge gulf between being a student and performing a job in a working office: so unless you have the right skills to make that transition successfully, your internship can be a no more than a wasted opportunity. The problem with many Singaporean students is that they are just too passive, too spoon-fed and lack initiative: they expect to be taught what to do in the work place - in the world of fund management, anyone with that kind of attitude may be able to get a job in the boring end of the fund management world (there's plenty of paperwork to be done in the back office) but if you want to be in the front line of fund management as a fund manager, or at least work within sales and marketing, then you have to be a lot more proactive than the vast majority of Singaporeans.

Why is the fund management industry in Singapore still full of expats?

This does reflect my experience when dealing with fund management companies in Singapore - back in 2011, I was working for a fund manager from Luxembourg looking for a Singaporean business partner to expand their distribution and operations in Asia. As part of that process, I met many potential partners and had a good chance to see how they operated - in many such companies, those in senior positions are usually (though not exclusively) expatriates or at least Singaporeans who have spent time working abroad, whilst those in the more junior, administrative tasks were local Singaporeans. If anything, the FMAC course at NYP is only preparing their students for these more local roles and okay, you have to start somewhere - maybe some of them will work their way up the career ladder to a more senior position but from what I had observed, that hasn't happened yet. That has a lot to do with the fact that these companies would still discriminate against someone without a degree from a top university.

I think this is a missed opportunity I'm afraid - here's what I would have done. Instead of making it a diploma from a poly, I would have made the course a degree course. The actual content of the course wouldn't need to change that much - but it should be a degree course at either NUS or SMU whereby it would only accept applicants with A levels or a diploma. To make sure that the course is prestigious, it should only accept students with top grades. The problem with the course right now is that it only leaves the student with a diploma and eventually, the student will probably still need to do a degree at some stage if s/he is seriously contemplating a career in the fund management industry. The worst case scenario is that you do this diploma and if you don't manage to get on the internship programme with a good firm to prove yourself, then frankly, you're highly unlikely to get a job in this industry. Is that a risk you want to take if you are really keen to work in the fund management industry? I wouldn't - it is just not worth the gamble.

3 years for a diploma but not a degree? Sounds like a bad deal to me.

Here's one part of the prospectus that did make me laugh my head off, under the objectives of the course, they claim: "Prepare graduates for successful career at the supervisory and management level in fund management, fund administration and related areas." That is just in the realm of pure fantasy, allow me to explain why. Firstly, very few people in the fund management industry actually reach supervisory or management level in the industry: let's take a company like Franklin Templeton (one of the biggest fund management companies in the world). What percentage of the people working at Franklin Templeton are in management and how many people are managed? There are plenty of professionals in such a company who are extremely good at what they do yet they do not manage others - it takes a completely different set of skills to be able to manage a team of people working under you. You need to excel at your job first before you are even offered the opportunity to manage others in the company, in a company like Franklin Templeton, many of those at senior management positions never did a course to prepare them for management roles - they simply rose to the top in a very organic way and got promoted after they have proven themselves. This has been the way successful businessmen have reached positions of management for so long - what makes you think that this is something you can actually 'teach' in a classroom environment?

Am I too tough on NYP? Probably - but here's the biggest challenge they face: they are trying to to create a major change within the fund management industry. The industry has always been quite happy to recruit quality graduates from top university and teach them everything from scratch to work in fund management. NYP is trying to convince these companies that it would be better for them to hire their FMAC graduates because they are so well trained at NYP and this would represent a massive saving for the employers if they no longer have to teach their new employees everything from scratch. Will FMAC graduates from NYP be able to hit the ground running, thus saving fund management company precious time, money and resources to train their new recruits? The answer is no for the following reasons: every fund management company is unique because they offer different kinds of funds. A fund of hedge funds would employ totally different strategies compared to say, an ethical green fund which invests in renewable energy or a fund that invests in Chinese equities. Furthermore, some companies target the retail market, whilst others target the institutional market - each approach would require a totally different sales & marketing strategy.

It all boils down to profit and loss for the employers.

As a student, you cannot predict what kind of company you will end up working for and you also cannot predict what role you will play within the company - there are so many possibilities from back office to due diligence to marketing to sales to administration to research to client/investor relations to HR to PR to analyst to accountant. So what NYP ends up doing is trying to teach you a bit of everything so they can claim to have covered all major topics within the syllabus - you end up knowing a little about everything but just not enough about one topic to be particularly useful at anything. In practice, for those lucky to land a job in the industry, there is a very steep learning curve to climb once they start working. Having the FMAC diploma doesn't really help you that much as there is just so much product specific knowledge that is unique to the company that the new recruit has to learn. Thus it doesn't really save the employer any time or money by hiring someone with the FMAC diploma. because the knowledge that the FMAC graduate has is way too generic to enable him to hit the ground running.

The complex nature of each companies product means that generic training isn't that useful compared to say, plumbing - whereby a plumber will be able to deal with any tap, sink or toilet even if he hasn't seen it before. That is why plumbing courses are very useful for those wishing to become plumbers, but fund management? Oh dear. I'm afraid NYP is really barking up the wrong tree here. We have to remember why the polytechnics in Singapore were set up in the first place and what they offered in the early days. They were designed to provide a viable alternative for those who were not suited for the academic nature of universities, they were places where you could learn a trade, get a diploma which would lead to a viable career by becoming a plumber, welder or electrician. The problem though, is that NYP are aspiring to be like a university these days and are trying to do something they are simply not able to deliver. A degree (or diploma) is supposed to prepare the student for the working world, giving the student all the skills s/he would need to embark on that new career path. I'm afraid the FMAC diploma just doesn't fulfill that purpose.

Can this diploma get you a job?

When I worked in fund management, I worked 5.5 years for an eccentric American hedge fund manager - he is incredibly intelligent (complete with a degree from Cambridge) and whilst working for him, he taught me a lot and I was able to learn first hand from the master himself. If I were to apply for another job in the industry, I would be able to use him as a reference and most employers would sit up and say, "oh look, if he can survive working this long for this hedge fund manager, he must be good." Now here's my problem with NYP - I don't know how the teachers on the course are, but if they are so absolutely brilliant at fund management, then why aren't they working in senior positions in a big firm like Franklin Templeton? Why are they instead, drawing a very modest salary teaching at NYP instead? My only conclusion is that these teachers have been rejected by the big firms like Franklin Templeton, but they have somehow acquired the qualifications to teach this course at NYP. Furthermore, this is an industry that is rapidly changing - strategies that were popular in 2014 are now completely out of date as people have come up with new products, new ideas and new strategies for 2016. These teachers at NYP have been out of the game for so long - how could they possibly know what the brightest brains at Franklin Templeton are getting up to? Anything taught on the FMAC is probably going to be out-of-date by the time the students graduate from the course.

As a gatekeeper, I'm afraid I apply the rule that the student can only be as good as his teacher - and in this case, it may sound extremely harsh, but that is how I would judge the quality of the teaching for this course. What can you possibly learn from someone who can't get a job with a real hedge funds manager, but wants to teach you about hedge funds? Oh, and you're supposed to then go on and do what your teacher has failed - get a good job in the industry? It doesn't make sense. Indeed, after having spent 10, even 20 years teaching at NYP, how much does the teacher know about what actually happens in the world of fund management, if he has never worked in the industry for that long? It is like trying to learn how to drive from a driving instructor who hasn't actually got a driver's license himself. He may be able to explain to you in great detail about how a car works, but what does he actually know about driving? Okay, you may remind me that the students may get an internship where they can actually experience the real working environment of a fund management company - but why should that be the icing on the cake? None of this makes any sense to me as a gatekeeper who has scrutinized CVs over the years, so I cannot recommend this course.

What is the right way to get a job in fund management?

So ultimately, if you are serious about working in the fund management industry, I'm afraid my advice would be to avoid this course and go do a degree at a good university instead. Now I'm sure I'm going to receive many angry comments from former students of the course who think that I have been way too harsh in this article - if you feel that I am wrong, then please, feel free to leave me a comment below and let's talk about it. Many thanks for reading.