Hello Mr. Voss,

I just read the article, and needless to say it is a great one!. It helped me a lot in getting an insight as to how to approach for a research analyst job when you have little or no experience in the concerned field.

I am a C++ programmer and I decided to make a jump into the field of finance by taking the CFA Level 1 examination in December 2012. The little experience that I have related to the finance field is the development and analysis I did for my finance client. I developed a migration tool between two financial software solutions so that the data created in the old software could be used in the new solution. This work involved in doing analysis of the both the old and the new application and to understand how best we can minimize manual processing and how accurate and maximum possible migration we could give to our client. It involved a thorough and great deal of analysis and helped me in creating my base concepts.

I completed the Level 1 exam in December 2012 and I am a CFA Level II candidate for 2014. I am actively looking out for career opportunities that can serve as a breakthrough for me in the finance industry and I can gain hands on.

It would be great if you could give me suggestions on how to approach my career path and what is it that I should be focusing on.

Thank you,
Ratika Kapoor