With quant skills increasingly in demand, choosing the career path and company that are right for you can be a challenge. Getting a little bit of experience – through vacation work or other work experience opportunities – can make it easier to choose.
Ashmeera Channa and Ukukhanya Khumalo are two young quants who were fortunate enough to gain some experience through FNB’s Future League Week – an experience programme that FNB describes as “designed to give you a sneak peek into a career extraordinary at FNB and give you a taste of what the Future League Graduate Programme is all about”.
Ukukhanya, who is now employed in Dynamic Decisioning at FNB on the bank’s Data Science Graduate Programme says her Future League Week experience definitely helped her decide where she wanted to work. “I had completed my undergraduate degree in Actuarial Science at the University of Pretoria, and my Honours in Mathematics and Statistics at Wits. I’d applied to a few graduate programmes and Future League Week really helped me decide which one I wanted to join when the offers came through.”
Ashmeera, who has joined FNB’s Graduate Programme in the Retail and Credit Analytics team in Private Wealth, agrees. “I did my undergrad and Honours in Actuarial Science at Wits, and you tend to assume that you’ll join an insurance company with those qualifications. Future League Week made me consider banking, which I hadn’t thought of as a fit for me before.”
Experiences like Future League Week have had to go digital in light of the ongoing pandemic, and many companies have gone to great lengths to ensure the online experience is just as valuable as an in-person one would have been.
“We attended presentations from various business units within the bank and heard from FNB’s graduate programme alumni about their experiences,” Ukhukhanya says. “It was insightful and interesting to hear from different teams and from the people who had gone before us.”
Ashmeera agrees. “It was the business unit presentations, and the ability to talk to people online to ask questions and understand what they do, that helped me understand how my career aspirations could align with the banking industry. The access to information and to people that I could speak to about my career choices helped me see that banking was a better fit for what I wanted to do.”
The virtual programme also gave the graduates taking part in Future League Week the opportunity to engage with each other and work together to complete tasks and activities. These included a virtual “race around the world”, in which graduates formed teams to complete a treasure hunt.
“I found the online experience very comfortable,” Ashmeera says. “There was a lot of opportunity to engage and ask questions, which can be difficult in person sometimes.”
Ukhukhanya agrees that the virtual Future League Week offered plenty of opportunity to engage with FNB representatives and her fellow participants. Both graduates made friends through Future League Week that they are still in touch with, even though not everyone that participated was placed on FNB’s graduate programme.
Ashmeera advises young quants to use opportunities like Future League Week to ask questions, especially those you might not want to ask in an interview setting, and to explore the company. “Future League Week also gave me a good feel for what my grad experience at FNB would be like, because the experience included doing assignments and networking in the same way the graduate programme does.”
“Curiosity is key,” Ukhukhanya says. “Ask as many questions as you can and meet as many people as possible if you’re fortunate enough to be part of an experience like this.”
