Kenyan landscape
The Kenyan educational system is tailored to provide its citizens with relevant knowledge and skills applicable in the current job market. There is however often a gap where theory does not translate to practical and employers often find that they have to re-train graduates to be able to undertake career roles effectively.
InVhestia is bridging this gap by educating university students on what is required of them in the current job market. Being a corporate and project finance advisory firm, we believe that graduates ought to know the latest trends in the market that will give them an edge as they look to fit into the job market.
The FAST Standard financial modelling certification is one such tool that will give not only graduates but current finance professions financial modelling skills to make them more marketable in the job market. It is not uncommon to find graduates who have a good grounding in finance and business theory but cannot effectively translate the same to financial models, InVhestia, being the first and only African organization accredited to offer this certification, is looking to plug this theory-practice gap.
FAST, which stands for flexible, appropriate, structured and transparent, is an international financial modelling methodology developed and utilized by various industry experts including those from F1F9, PWC, Finance Mechanics, InVhestia and Grant Thornton.
The lecture
The lecture was eye opening for the 30 third-year students in attendance. They had a basic concept of what modelling was but one could tell the fascination with what they can do with excel. To certain the relevance of the FAST Standard, Stephen Gugu, the co-founder of InVhestia and Principal mentioned the companies that he and his team had trained for the FAST Standard modeling course. Most of them were well known financial institution that the students would like to intern or even work in.
Stephen gave the students an explanation of how the current job market works. While recruiting for most financial positions nowadays, employers, as part of the interview, will give the interviewee a case study and ask them to come up with a financial model that demonstrates their theoretical and practical knowledge. The FAST certification is meant to give the employer confidence that one is a competent financial modeler just as Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) certification indicates that one is a competent financial analyst, FAST Standard Certification is already becoming a necessary post graduate course to take for one to show their competency in financial modelling.
One of the questions asked by the students was, ‘What guarantees do we have that we will get the well-paying job?’
The answer is quite simple, there are no guarantees. It’s the same question a person would ask themselves when applying for a master’s degree or a PhD; there are no guarantees but they give you an edge during an interview process and if that is not important it also gives you skills you can employ in your own work in budgeting and even consulting projects.
To learn more about the FAST Standard, go here.
