Hi Brian, thank you very much for your reply. It’s very helpful cause my case seems quite rare around me, so was pretty hard to find relevant information.

And you’re right. Due to visa issues, most of my acquaintances had to take a detour to graduate schools in the states and still had to think a lot about visa situations.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts ?

If you already have a green card, I think you can probably do this, although I don’t have direct examples of someone doing it in this exact same situation.

People get into trouble when they move to the U.S. first on a student or other visa and then can’t stay and work afterward, can’t get a green card, etc., but if you already have it, it should be doable. I would still say an internal transfer is a better idea so you don’t have to spend time looking for another job at a boutique firm, but if that is not an option, sure, you could do this and move to a smaller firm to change your coverage and make it less specific to SK.

Thanks for the helpful posts. Although it is not relevant with Investment Banking in Europe or Asia, I would like to ask a question about changing locations internationally here.

I am Korean and currently working at an American asset management company’s South Korea branch as a public fixed income credit investment analyst. I have around 10 years of work experiences, and my company has pretty large AUM (not top 10, but top 50~100).

But because of family reasons, I might emigrate to the US with the green card, so I am doing research about the investment management job market in the US. I want to continue to pursue public investing roles, especially fundamental public equities or public high yield (not IB/PE). I think internal transfer is the best, but it’s not that active at my company so I am searching for external opportunities together. But the thing is my coverage is highly locally focused to the Korean market, so it is not directly transferable to most of public investing roles in the US. I also have a local undergraduate degree.

Because of this obstacle of not directly transferable coverage, I am thinking of targeting 2~3 year junior equities analyst role at a smaller or boutique investment management company in the US first and restarting there, and making a jump to large investment management firms with the same coverage later.

I was wondering if you’ve observed those with the green card who got an investment management job in the US straight from other countries, particularly without a costly master’s degree in the US. Wondering if this job search strategy is realistic or unrealistic. Thanks for reading a long comment and any input would be appreciated!

Sorry, don’t know, but I would not think they’re common unless you’re interviewing specifically with the Restructuring group.

It helps a bit, but the problem is that banks and headhunters are not always in full communication with each other, so you run into these issues where even employee referrals don’t help if the headhunters don’t know about the referral.

Occasionally, you can win IB internships in Germany without knowing German – but I think these have become less common over time. So, I would still not recommend focusing on the country unless you know the language.

It is geared toward finance and professional services careers, but it still works for something like CRE (and Big 4 firms and anything involving client or investment work). It’s less useful for something like engineering or product management roles at tech companies because “networking” works differently there, and you don’t necessarily need as much of it to win job offers.