Financial meltdown depresses job market but creates opportunity for financial workers to ‘rebrand’ themselves.
With the extraordinary demise of “the Big Five” investment banks in September and the turmoil in the global economy that followed, the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that this would be a lousy time to be enrolled in a business program.
But pundits say it’s far too soon to hit the panic button.
“I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I see this as being a very temporary hiccup,” says Bernard Milano, president and trustee of the KPMG Foundation, the KPMG Disaster Relief Fund and the Ph.D. Project, which since its founding in 1994 has tripled the number of minority business professors from 294 to about 900.
“Even though you hear of 10,000 jobs lost here, 15,000 there, you are still going to need the same number of people” to tend to the nation’s finances. “Think about it: over $250 million has been poured into banks and mutual funds recently. Because of the regulatory structure, banks can leverage that 10-to-1, so that’s $2.5 billion that has to find its way somewhere. It can’t sit in a drawer or in a mattress — it has to be invested.”
Nicole Chestang agrees. She’s the chief client officer for the Graduate Management Admissions Council, sponsor of the Graduate Management Admissions Test, or GMAT. “Even in down economic times, people are looking for talent,” she says — and that talent has to be trained.
