Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Chris Peake; I work in IT in an investment bank, specifically in equities IT which is linked to share trading on the markets like the LSE.
Return to topWhat is Investment Banking?
An investment bank is made up of a variety of parts, any big investment bank anyway and it tends to be an equities division which is traders, which everyone knows about, trading shares on the money markets on the LSE, on the New York Stock Exchange, they are the ones you hear about on the news. Another part of it is debt where you are selling debt to people, you are selling people’s mortgages, it is what allows you to buy a house, to there is that side. Another side are the investment bankers themselves and they are the ones that are going out to companies and saying you could do better if you merged with this company or we could perhaps raise some money for you to expand your business by issuing shares and that is when there starts to be an overlap between an investment banker and the equities division. The investment bank will say I think you should issue some shares and the equities traders will help them do that, they will help them sell those shares, the other piece of it is private asset management so that will be perhaps wealthy individuals or funds like you would invest in if you were trying to save some money, they would be funds that are managed where people pay in to them and they are trying to make a profit so that propels savings go up in value.
Return to topWhat attracted you to this career?
In some ways I guess I fell into it a little bit. I came from the course I did at university, so I did computer science, and I went from an industrial placement, it was really encouraged at university that you got taken on placements so they brought in lots of companies.
Return to topWhat does your job involve?
So I am a project lead in the equities section of the bank, specifically the area is called Buckins technology and that is about moving money into different clients’ accounts based on the trading they have done. I don’t look after the trading systems directly, the ones that are going out to exchanges doing share dealing and stuff, I sit one step behind that and as project lead I have a number of teams that look up after a number of systems that I own, so there are three different systems, and my day to day job is basically managing those projects making sure the teams are working on the right things, they are meeting firm standards. I tend to do coding still as well but I will also code review the work that they do, so in many ways I am still quite technical, a developer in many ways but I also do the project management and people management side just making sure the teams are ticking over and everyone is happy.
Because I work in an area of IT that is slightly removed from the front office, as it is called which is the trading floor, you know the traders going off doing their trades, that is the front office area, systems in that area you would have traders coming directly to you saying I need to be able to do this, I need to be able to change it to make my trade to go somewhere else, the simple case, I am one step removed so I tend to interact more with the support groups that sit on the trading floor who have the support systems they will need support to make their jobs easier, some of that tends to come through business analysts so they will look at the problem and come up with requirements how they can basically improve it for the support teams that we help with our systems. So it will tend to be either those support teams coming direct to us and saying “we have got a problem, this is a process that is taking us a lot of time, it is really manual but here is how we could improve your system here so that it does it for us. Based on those requirements we will look at it and you kind of have to understand the business again, they are busy people, you haven’t just got someone who is writing up, this is what I would like, I need you to do this, here is the problem go and sort it. You initially have to go and figure out how you are going to make it work for them and then it will just be a case of working with your team splitting up the task into the pieces you will give to them to work on and then go away and develop it, we test it and give it back to these groups that are asking for it and we say test that out make sure you are happy with it and then we will just deliver it to them.
Return to topDid you consider becoming a Business Analyst?
When I first started here as a graduate, I did specifically choose a role that did give me a lot more business analysis because I wanted to build up that side of my skill set. I had been here as an industrial placement and I had done a lot of the technology side of things and specifically chose a role and was given a role that gave me a lot of chance to do business analysis and I could have chosen to go that way, that was an option and in fact. When you come to the end of your graduate programme, at the end of the first year, you have actually got the option of becoming a developer or a business analyst and you can make that choice at that point. So I never wanted to be purely a business analyst I wanted to do some analysis because I knew that would help me in a technology career as well, but you do have that choice.
I don’t mind doing analysis but my preference has always been to write systems, to write software rather that just to write documents, I think writing systems alone is not physical, and you still deliver a product that generally does something pretty good whereas writing a document, I don’t get the same satisfaction and say oh I have written a brilliant document. It doesn’t work for me.
Return to topWhat do you do on a typical day?
There is a lot of emailing and talking on the phones, I would rather go and talk to people but a lot of my team is either in India or Sweden so I don’t have the luxury of popping over to their desk. I have only got one person in London working for me and there are seven outside of London, so we have just got video conferencing on our desktops and PC's so I do actually get to see people but I am not there with them. I guess because a lot of the team are in other locations, you do spend more time on the phones and emailing than you would normally because it takes a bit more communication when people are further away so that takes up a lot of my day. Some of my day will be in coding, doing developments and some of it just in project management and the administration that goes with running a team so reviews, time sheets and the not so interesting stuff perhaps.
Return to topWho are your clients?
On the whole they are clients in the sense that they are clients of the firm and not external clients of external companies. Our clients are the business, the traders, the support teams within the company who are asking us to make improvements to systems and build new systems to meet the requirements of this company as a whole, there is always new business that we are trying to do and that always means new systems or changes to the systems to make that happen but that is all within the company.
Return to topWhat are the best bits about your job?
I guess the different things that come along every day. I always wanted a job that changed all the time because I get bored easily so I think in a lot of smaller IT companies you will be stuck doing a specific thing for a lot of the time and to deliver one product over a period of months or years whereas investment banking tends to be much more fast paced than that. You are responding to the needs of the business, so what you are being asked can continually change and that is what I find quite exciting and I guess because you are doing things the business is asking for directly, there is an obvious impact on what you do, what you deliver has an effect, it earns the firm more money, it makes peoples jobs easier, there is an immediate feedback on what you have done.
Return to topWhat are the worst bits about your job?
I guess as I said the administration side can be a bit boring when you have got a team of people, it is nice to have a team to be there and be with them and making sure everyone is happy together but on the other side you have got to do all the administration and time sheets and the red tape side of things. The bigger the company, the more admin you have because a bigger company needs control of what its people are doing, you can’t just talk to the person next to you, it is what everyone is doing, you have got to fill in the forms that is probably the least interesting bit.
Not necessarily tension, there aren’t people arguing about who gets their thing done first, there are a lot of conflicting pieces of work that have to be prioritised there will be a lot of people asking for different things, you have to figure out which is the best one to do first based on how much time it will save people, how important is it to the business to get this delivered to make them more money. We in IT will tend to have a say in that, we will say “it will take us two weeks, and then you will get this and then you will be making this much money for the business”. Another thing which you think is great will take us six months and you think perhaps we should do that next, you are kind of working with them to understand how much time your team has got to work on things, how long it will take them, what benefit that will give back to the business, it is a bit of a juggling act, you have got various people asking for things and you have got to keep them all happy, keep them all in the air at the same time.
Return to topWhat has been your greatest achievement?
I guess the one thing I can think of, I have moved around the company, I have been in my current role for a year and three months, but I have been here for five years, and when I moved into this role, I moved into managing a team who wasn’t delivering particularly well, there was not a good PR around the team, or about the business that we talked to, they weren’t particularly happy, they didn't trust the software releases that we were going to and just assumed that something would go wrong. Over the last year and a bit we have kind of pulled that back and the business is really happy with what we deliver to them and getting a team of people to that point that the business actually recognises that these people do a good job, that is probably one of the things I am most proud of.
Return to topAny regrets?
I am not sure there is to be honest I have been quite lucky, it has all fallen into place quite well, I feel I have been at the right place at the right time, I have not necessarily put a huge amount of thought into what I wanted to do, from university it was kind of a natural progression from my degree, the companies came in, so I wasn’t going out there going who do I want to work for, they kind of came to us and I could make a decision. I have been lucky I haven’t wanted to move I haven’t wanted to go to another company, I like working here I think it is one of the better companies and I have been given a lot of chances, and there have been promotions and I have always done the job I wanted when I wanted to move, I have been here quite a while but I have moved recently and it has been to a role that I really wanted to take on, I don’t think there is anything I would change.
Return to topWhat is the pay like and are there any perks?
If you think about IT and the fact that you could work in IT in a number of industries, IT itself isn’t necessarily an industry you can work in a number of areas. IT in an investment bank is pretty competitive in terms of jobs in IT, it is a very well paid job. In terms of perks there are the usual I guess it is like any big company would have, you have got a pension scheme, health care scheme, there is a gym in the building that you get a decent rate on and it is handy, you can just go down to a different floor, they are probably the main perks.
Return to topHow long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?
Normal working hours are probably 9 to 6 on a normal day with a bit of time off for lunch but generally pretty much working 9 to 6. In It you will find it is the case anywhere that you have a support role as well where you are covering out of hours for a particular period and that does vary a lot between teams, I can talk about what I do which is one day a week I will be in the office at 7.15 but get to leave a bit earlier, Another day the following week I will be online at 6.30 in the morning doing some morning checks and making sure everything is ok but that is shared in the team so there is someone doing that every day but there are enough people in the team so I only have to do it once a week, I guess in the evening, software releases that we have to do out of hours, so that will be evenings or weekends. So yes you do tend to do a little bit outside the business but you tend to be able to do that at home so you don't necessarily have to be in the office late and night doing that sort of thing.
Return to topIs there much in the way of travel?
Not really, not apart from my commute, which is enough travel for me. I’ve not really had much chance, I have been out to Sweden once for a week, because as I said some of my team are out there, that is when we kicked off a big project, I went out there to meet them for a week, I hadn’t met them before so it was a good chance to catch up with them. It tends to come down to what role you are in you are not guaranteed for travelling but in the right place, in the right role, you might do quite a bit of travelling, now if you are working on a system that is going to be deployed globally, or in New York or Tokyo you are probably end up travelling to New York and Tokyo, it varies.
Return to topDo you have to be based anywhere in particular?
You have got to be in London, possibly in one of the other big cities, but it is pretty much London, the City, Canary Wharf, certainly in this country. If you are talking about IT generally yes there is a lot of opportunities in any big town, city for other types of IT job.
Return to topWhat is the working environment like?
Dress code is pretty much what I am wearing, shirt and tie, pretty smart, because there is always the chance that you will meet clients and clients of an investment bank tend to be someone we want to keep so try and impress them so pretty formal. I guess IT outside of investment banking, the impression I get is that it is a lot more informal. The office itself is nice because it is a new building, it is all open plan, the floor I am on it probably has 80 or so people I can see on my side of the floor, the other side there are probably 200 people, so they are quite large floors but all open plan so you can see everyone. Demographic of people, there is as a range fairly young as a whole but there is a fairly wide range from 20-21 to 40s mid 40s tends to be the highest, it tends to be. Being in IT, it is predominantly male, but there are a fair number or women there it is probably increasing.
Return to topHow did you get into your job?
A lot of people that go into IT jobs have got a computer science degree, it tends to be a 2:1, it will tend to be from a fairly good university, it does not have to be from a very specific university but just has to be a very good degree. The only thing that people have to go on is about what you do in your spare time, it is about the other experience you have, in some ways that is more important than the degree itself, or at least at the beginning at least equally as important, what jobs you had before, what you did in those jobs and what you learned.
Return to topWhat's the application process like?
There is a graduate scheme, there are industrial placements, the year out of university or perhaps the year after university, it is predominantly a year within your degree. There are sandwich placements as well which will be a summer internship, which would just be for the summer two or three months and there are schemes for all of those things. The application process tends to start quite a long time before you are planning to start. I know a few people that have missed the boat because they haven’t realised how early on you have to start applying and looking for roles for industrial placements and summer placements. Yes there is a specific graduate scheme that you have, whatever role you go into, you come in as a graduate, there is a specific scheme that lasts about a year, that you would stay on and during that time you are called a graduate and whatever your role is and once you finish that you get a certificate, saying well done you are not a graduate anymore and you are on into your normal role. If you are coming in not straight from university obviously there is the usual, you come in via agencies or apply via websites, there are jobs up on the websites.
Return to topWhat are the key skills required for your job?
Key skills to do my job, one is communication and in many ways although I work in IT that is one of the most important, it is probably at least as important as being a developer and writing code. I think especially IT in an investment bank, you need to be able to express yourself you need to be able to say what it is you do what it is you are trying to deliver and you need to be able to understand what it is that people want because they will come directly to you and say I want you to do this for me, I want you to make it work in this way, and you have to be able to talk to them and figure out with them about how it is you are going to make it work. Without communication you are pretty stuck. You have obviously got to have pretty decent technical skills you know programming languages, ability to analyse things logically to figure out problems, so on the flip side it is the communication thing again, if you haven’t got that you just wont succeed.
Return to topWhat's your top tip for breaking into your industry?
I guess there are two things, on the whole a lot of the degrees are similar, and everyone is going to have a 2:2 a first or probably even a 2:2, so looking at CV's it will tend to be what they are doing in their spare time, so hobbies, especially things like team sports which demonstrates the work as part of a team, and that is obviously important here but even things that, just having interest outside work, is looked favourably on because it means they area fairly normal nice person. The other main thing is work experience and that is another very important thing. It doesn’t have to be work experience related to IT or the job you are going into, you can give a description of what you did what your role was and what you got out of that and what responsibilities you had. That is all important stuff to be specifically related to IT that kind of does help as well.
Return to topWhat's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?
In IT there is not a specific timed career path, you will be a developer for two years, a senior developer for four years and then you will be a project manager, the only thing that is timed is the graduate scheme, you are a graduate developer for a year, and then you become a developer automatically. Beyond that is its pretty much meritocracy so if you are doing a good job and you are doing work above and beyond your current role is, you will get promoted, that is pretty much as simple as that so career progression can be fast or slow, some people done necessarily want to move up beyond a certain point they are happy to stay as a developer that is what they love doing then don’t want to do project management or team management that is just not interesting to them which is absolutely fine. So there are a couple of paths within IT that you can go up, you can either go through a developer, become a senior developer that is pretty standard at the beginning. Then you can choose to branch out more to the management and the team management side which would see you becoming a team leader, a project lead, which is what I am, a project manager, and them onwards and upwards to managing departments and beyond that. You can choose to go the other way especially in the last two or three years, where they have realised they have to do this, after senior developer you can become a technical lead or as senior technical lead where you are saying I am really good at a technical person but I don’t want the management side but I want to be recognised as someone that really knows their stuff about particular areas of IT within the bank and that is your other option to head out that way but again how long you take to get there or when you choose to make those decisions, there is not fixed time period.
Return to topWhere do you see the industry going?
I think if you are looking at IT in an investment bank you have always got to be interested in investment banking, it is not just about being interested in IT, you need to be interested enough to the business, because you are so closely linked to the business that you have to understand it. In terms of hot areas within IT there are a lot of things like enterprise java, the enterprise software where you are designing web applications and things, it can be quite a good area to look at there are a number of jobs out there around that. The rest is pretty much about staying current with the current technologies. One thing I was surprised by, when you think about a big bank you think about really old computer systems and big boxes and nothing has changed in years, but in fact banks, more than anywhere else is really cutting edge technology. So my advice would be to keep up to date with kind of technology news sites, where you are learning about new technologies and actually go away and look at them and understand how they might work and stay as up to date as possible because those are the kind of things, you need to be current, don’t just stick with what you learnt at university, keep learning.
Return to topIs there scope for movement during or after this career?
I guess IT is spread across industries, investment banking is just one part of IT, you could go to IT in loads of different roles in retail, in a retail department store. The IT skills definitely transfer and there is nothing specific about IT skills that you learn in investment bank that everyone is using the same IT as a whole so you can certainly transfer that to other retail sectors or heavy industry there is room everywhere, if you were talking about going out of IT and completely moving jobs then the fact that you are managing teams or the fact that you have to be quite analytical and logical about being in IT and those are skills that take you into other jobs if you really want them, but IT certainly you can choose any range of industries to go in to.
Return to topWhat are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?
There are a couple of websites that you can look at, there is one called the Serverside, if you Google that it will come up, that is a lot about the enterprise software and enterprise java and the big enterprise systems there and always talking about new technologies coming up and discussing the older ones and how best they can be used. Within investment banking specifically even reading things about the business as well like Financial Times, that can be useful, reading up how the equity markets work or the debt markets work that is useful as well so any of the financial publications or you can get a lot of text books or just kind of simple books that you can learn about the basics of finance, they can be useful, just generally technology you use, so like The Register tends to be one that a lot of people look at but it does keep you up to date with what is going on in technology.
Return to topIf you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?
I would probably want to do something outdoors, I quite like something like landscape gardening or something, there is nothing else I can imagine myself doing in an office environment in a big company, this is what I am good at I enjoy what I do, so if it was going to be something else it would be pretty different, that is probably the way I would go.
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