How to Become a Financial Analyst

This job is about turning financial data into a decision. That means building models that project revenue, cost, and cash flow, evaluating stocks, bonds, and other investments, and writing research that tells an investor, a manager, or a client what to do next. The stock-picking image most people have is mostly wrong. Most of the actual work is modeling in Excel, checking assumptions, and writing a recommendation that can survive someone poking holes in it.

Where you do this work changes what the job looks like day to day. A sell-side analyst works for a broker-dealer or investment bank, covers a set of stocks, and publishes research that clients use to trade. A buy-side analyst works inside a mutual fund, hedge fund, pension fund, or insurance company, doing similar research to inform the firm's own portfolio rather than to sell a trade idea. A corporate analyst, often called FP&A, works inside a company that isn't in the financial industry at all, building the budgets and forecasts that help that company's own executives make decisions.

It helps to know what this role is not. A financial advisor works directly with individual clients, sells financial products, or manages personal portfolios, and is judged on client relationships as much as on analysis; that's client-facing work, not analyst work. An accountant is different too: an accountant's job is recording transactions, preparing financial statements, and keeping a company's books accurate and compliant. The analyst's job starts roughly where the accountant's job ends, using those numbers to build a model and make a call about what should happen next.

The most direct path into the role runs through six steps, in roughly this order.

• Earn a bachelor's degree in finance, economics, or accounting. A quantitative business degree is the standard entry point, and it's what most job postings screen for. Start with bachelor's in finance programs if you already know this is the direction you want.
• Build financial-modeling and Excel skill on top of the degree. Coursework gives you the vocabulary; the modeling skill is what gets you the interview. Employers test this directly, often with a timed Excel case.
• Get licensed if you're headed sell-side. Roles at broker-dealers and investment banks often require the Series 7 and Series 63, but you don't study for these on your own dime: an employer sponsors and administers them after you're hired. Buy-side roles and corporate FP&A jobs usually skip licensing entirely.
• Decide whether the CFA charter fits your track. It isn't required to work as a financial analyst, but it's the field's most respected credential, especially in investment and asset management.
• Consider a master's or MBA for the next jump. Not required to start, but common for moving into senior analyst, portfolio management, or leadership roles. Master's in finance programs are built for exactly this stage.
• Start as a junior or associate analyst and build a track record. This is where the modeling skill, the licenses, and the degree turn into an actual career, one recommendation and one earnings cycle at a time.

Stack the timeline up and you're looking at roughly four years for the bachelor's degree, then one to two years if you add a master's or MBA, plus however long licensing or the CFA program takes alongside your first job. Most people reach an established analyst role, meaning real ownership of coverage or a model, in four to six years total. Skipping the master's and the CFA doesn't disqualify you; it just means your degree and your junior-analyst performance have to do more of the talking.

A bachelor's degree is the entry-level education requirement for the role, and the BLS confirms this directly: finance, economics, and accounting are the three majors that show up most often on an analyst's resume, with statistics and other quantitative fields close behind. What matters more than the major's name is the coursework inside it. Corporate finance, valuation, financial modeling, statistics, and accounting are the classes that actually get used on the job. A degree heavy on theory and light on these leaves you building your modeling skill from scratch after graduation.

A master's degree or an MBA is common for analysts who want to move up, but it isn't a legal requirement at any point in the career, entry-level or senior. The math on when it's worth it is straightforward: a master's in finance makes the most sense when you want to specialize technically, deepen your modeling and valuation skill, or break into a role your bachelor's alone wouldn't open. An MBA makes more sense when the goal is management, a career switch into finance from another field, or the network and recruiting pipeline a full-time program provides. If you're already in a junior analyst seat and performing well, a few more years of experience and the CFA charter often move the needle more than an additional degree does.

For readers still choosing a major or comparing programs, the finance degree programs ranked on this site cover every level, from the bachelor's you need to start to the master's that helps you advance.

No. You don't need the CFA charter to work as a financial analyst, and plenty of analysts build full careers without it, especially in corporate FP&A. But the CFA is the field's premier credential, and for anyone aiming at investment management, portfolio management, or research at a buy-side firm, it's the single biggest lever for pay and career ceiling over a ten-year span.

The charter requires passing three exam levels, each testing progressively deeper material in ethics, portfolio management, valuation, and financial analysis, plus a qualified work-experience requirement on top of the exams. Most candidates take several years to finish all three levels and satisfy the experience requirement, often while working full time as an analyst. It's a grind by design; that difficulty is exactly what makes the charter mean something to employers on the buy side.

Sell-side roles at broker-dealers and investment banks run on a different credentialing track entirely. Instead of the CFA, these jobs typically require FINRA licenses, most commonly the Series 7 and Series 63, and the employer sponsors and administers these after you're hired rather than you pursuing them independently beforehand. Buy-side firms and corporate finance departments usually skip FINRA licensing altogether. Know which side of the industry you're headed toward before you decide what to study for: the sell side wants licenses, the buy side wants the CFA, and corporate FP&A often wants neither.

The median annual wage lands at $101,350 in May 2024, or about $49 an hour, according to BLS OEWS data. The typical range runs wide: the lowest 10 percent earned less than $62,410, while the highest 10 percent earned more than $180,550. That spread isn't random; it tracks industry, city, years of experience, and whether an analyst holds the CFA or an MBA, which is exactly why the full financial analyst salary breakdown by industry and experience level is worth reading before you negotiate an offer.

The job outlook backs up the pay. The BLS projects 6 percent employment growth for the occupation from 2024 to 2034, faster than the 3 percent average projected across all occupations, on a base of about 368,500 jobs in 2024. That growth works out to roughly 29,900 openings a year on average over the decade, most of them from people leaving the field or retiring rather than brand-new positions, which is normal for an established occupation this size.

Financial analysts who last in the role tend to share a few traits: they're comfortable with numbers and detail, they follow markets or their industry closely enough to have opinions about it, and they can defend a recommendation when someone senior pushes back on every assumption in the model. If building a spreadsheet that has to be right, not just look right, sounds satisfying rather than tedious, that's a good sign.

The upside is real: a median salary over $101,350, a wide range of exit opportunities into corporate finance, private equity, consulting, or portfolio management, and a career ladder that's actually clear compared to a lot of business roles. The downside deserves equal airtime. Sell-side hours can run long, especially around earnings season. Markets don't care about your personal schedule, and a bad call can follow you. The CFA, if you go that route, takes years of studying on top of a full-time job. And a meaningful share of the work, reconciling a model, updating comps, formatting a deck, is repetitive in a way the job postings don't advertise.

If the trade-offs still sound worth it, the next step is the one from the steps above: get the bachelor's degree, start building financial-modeling skill now rather than after graduation, and start applying to junior analyst roles as soon as you have both.