Corporate Finance Jobs

There are many corporate finance jobs on the market today, but the high unemployment rates allow companies to be a bit more selective. Big companies know that they can get a highly qualified individual for an inexpensive wage; this is especially true for corporate finance jobs. This obviously creates some conflict if you have a lot of experience and an advanced degree. Unfortunately, you may be worth a lot more tomorrow that you are worth today. If you accept a job at a low salary level just to keep the ball rolling while you wait out the economy, you will not get a massive raise from the company you work for when the recession is declared over.

For this reason, a lot of people are taking the corporate finance jobs as a contractor. Working as a temporary employee has a lot of advantages when the economy is down. The first of which is you can likely maintain your salary level, but you will have to lose out on benefits. If your spouse has a job that includes health insurance, you are really only losing out on retirement, vacation, and sick time.

Temporary Corporate Finance Jobs

The other big advantage to working as a temp is you avoid gaps in your resume. Even if you have the resources to sit out for a while, you shouldn’t as employers do not like to see a spotty resume. Ultimately, even if you work multiple contract jobs you will do so under the same employer. This way you can list everything under one heading on your resume and make the individual contracts sub-headings. As far as your future employer is concerned, you had one job for the duration of your contract work.

Finally, employers generally pay a new employee a similar salary to what they had before. If you take a low level job, your salary will take a big hit. This will make it nearly impossible to recover when the corporate finance jobs come back into the economy. Your current employer is not going to give you a 30% raise just because the market bounced back. In addition, your future employer will look at your current salary and offer you only a small bump. This alone can push your career back a decade as you are no longer looked at as a high level guy.

Corporate Finance Jobs – Choose your Title Wisely

If you go from CFO to staff accountant, the staff accountant part is what will stick out to employers. Of course, most of the corporate finance jobs are low level and the high level management positions don’t come up too often. For this reason it is important that your resume is suited for the type of position you want, not the type of position you held in the past. By working a contract job for a while, you are suggesting to your future employer that you were the CFO at company A, and then you did high level consulting for a while. This story makes much more sense than you were a senior finance manager than you were an analyst for half the salary.

When you go after the corporate finance jobs, be sure you put your best foot forward and your work experience always adds up to the job you are searching for.