Certified Public Accountant

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• Top 6 Careers in Finance

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• Investment Banker

  Investment banking emerged as a distinct financial specialty in the 19th century alongside firms like J.P. Morgan, which helped major corporations and railroads raise capital and structure large financial deals during the rapid industrial expansion of the era. The modern role centers on helping corporations and governments raise capital through issuing stocks and bonds, and advising on mergers and acquisitions, with entry-level analysts typically hired directly out of undergraduate finance, economics, or business programs into highly competitive multi-year analyst programs at major banks. Investment banking is widely known both for offering some of the highest entry-level compensation of any career path and for demanding notoriously long working hours, particularly for junior analysts working on active deals with tight closing deadlines. Investment banking's combination of its historic role financing major corporate and government capital needs and its reputation for extreme entry-level compensation alongside extreme hours has made it one of the most competitively sought-after career paths in finance.

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• Financial Analyst

  Financial analysts evaluate investments, companies, and industries to guide decisions for banks, investment firms, insurance companies, and corporations, a role that grew significantly in scale alongside the expansion of modern institutional investing in the 20th century. The profession is closely tied to the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) credential, a rigorous three-level certification program established by the CFA Institute in 1963 that has become a widely recognized standard of expertise across the investment industry globally. Financial analyst roles split broadly between buy-side positions at investment firms managing money directly and sell-side positions at banks and brokerages producing research and recommendations for outside clients, each carrying distinct incentive structures and career paths. The financial analyst career's combination of its close association with the globally recognized CFA credential and its split between distinct buy-side and sell-side career tracks has made it one of the most structured and widely pursued paths in the finance industry.

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• Actuary

  Actuarial science traces its origins to 17th-century England, where early actuaries at life insurance companies used mortality statistics and probability theory to price insurance policies and pensions, making it one of the oldest quantitative financial professions still practiced today. Becoming a credentialed actuary in the United States requires passing a lengthy series of rigorous exams administered by professional actuarial societies, a process that can take most candidates several years to complete while working full-time in the field. Actuaries are employed primarily by insurance companies, pension funds, and government agencies to assess financial risk using statistics and mathematical modeling, and the profession has consistently ranked among the least stressful and highest-satisfaction careers in major workplace surveys, largely due to strong job security and manageable working hours relative to compensation. The actuarial career's combination of its centuries-old roots in insurance mathematics and its unusually strong reputation for job satisfaction and work-life balance has made it one of the most consistently well-regarded careers in the finance industry.

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• Financial Advisor

  Financial advising as a distinct consumer-facing profession expanded significantly in the United States following the passage of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which established a regulatory framework distinguishing advisors who manage client money from brokers who simply execute trades. The profession grew substantially further after the widespread decline of traditional employer pension plans in favor of self-directed 401(k) retirement accounts starting in the 1980s, creating much greater individual demand for personalized guidance on retirement savings and investment decisions. Financial advisors operate under varying regulatory standards depending on their specific licensing, with a key industry distinction between advisors held to a strict "fiduciary" standard requiring them to act in a client's best interest and those held to a lower "suitability" standard, a difference that has drawn significant consumer protection attention. The financial advisor career's combination of its growth alongside the shift from pensions to self-directed retirement accounts and its important fiduciary-versus-suitability regulatory distinction has made it one of the most consumer-facing and closely scrutinized careers in personal finance.

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• Hedge Fund Manager

  The modern hedge fund is widely credited to Alfred Winslow Jones, who launched what's generally considered the first hedge fund in 1949, using a strategy of combining both long and short stock positions specifically designed to reduce overall market risk compared to traditional investment funds. Hedge fund managers oversee pooled investment funds using a wide range of aggressive strategies unavailable to traditional mutual funds, typically charging a distinctive "two and twenty" fee structure of a 2 percent annual management fee plus 20 percent of investment profits. The industry is subject to lighter regulatory oversight than mutual funds since hedge funds are generally restricted to wealthy accredited investors and institutions, a structure that has drawn both significant profits and significant scrutiny during major financial events like the 2008 financial crisis. The hedge fund manager career's combination of its origins in Alfred Winslow Jones's pioneering long-short strategy and its famously lucrative "two and twenty" fee structure has made it one of the most highly compensated and closely watched careers in modern finance.

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More in Careers

• Mark Zuckerberg

  Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in 2004 while a student at Harvard University, and the platform's rapid expansion from a college-only social network into a globally dominant social media platform made Zuckerberg one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Facebook, later restructured as Meta Platforms in 2021, acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, two of the largest acquisitions in social media history, consolidating several of the world's most widely used communication and social platforms under a single corporate parent. Zuckerberg's 2021 rebranding of the company to Meta reflected a significant strategic pivot toward virtual and augmented reality technology and the broader "metaverse" concept, an ambitious and closely scrutinized bet on an entirely new computing platform beyond the company's existing social media dominance. Mark Zuckerberg's combination of his rapid rise building Facebook into the dominant global social network and his major strategic pivot toward the metaverse under the Meta rebrand has made him one of the most significant and closely watched technology CEOs of his generation.

• Sundar Pichai

  Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004 and rose through the company overseeing the development of Google Chrome and Chrome OS before being named CEO of Google in 2015, and later CEO of Google's parent holding company, Alphabet, in 2019. Pichai has overseen Google's continued dominance in internet search and online advertising while significantly expanding the company's investment in artificial intelligence, including Google's development of large language models and its Gemini AI products competing directly against OpenAI's ChatGPT. His leadership has also included navigating significant antitrust scrutiny and litigation against Google in the United States and Europe over the company's dominant market position in search and digital advertising, some of the most significant technology antitrust cases in decades. Sundar Pichai's combination of his engineering-driven rise through Google's product ranks and his leadership steering the company's major artificial intelligence investments has made him one of the most significant technology CEOs navigating the industry's AI-driven transformation.

• Satya Nadella

  Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and became the company's third CEO in 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer during a period when Microsoft's stock and cultural relevance had significantly stagnated relative to newer technology competitors like Google and Apple. Nadella redirected Microsoft's strategic focus significantly toward cloud computing, aggressively growing the company's Azure cloud platform into a major competitor to Amazon Web Services, and he pursued major acquisitions including LinkedIn in 2016 and GitHub in 2018, expanding Microsoft's reach into professional networking and software development. Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft's market capitalization grew dramatically, at various points making it the most valuable company in the world, and Nadella oversaw Microsoft's major investment in OpenAI, positioning the company as a significant player in the generative artificial intelligence industry. Satya Nadella's combination of his successful cloud-computing-driven turnaround of Microsoft and the company's major strategic bet on OpenAI has made him one of the most commercially significant technology CEOs of the 2010s and 2020s.

• Bill Gates

  Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 alongside Paul Allen, and Gates's 1980 deal to license an operating system to IBM for its new personal computer line, later developed into MS-DOS, became the foundational business decision that built Microsoft into the dominant software company of the personal computing era. Gates served as Microsoft's CEO until 2000, overseeing the company's growth into the world's largest software company and the release of the Windows operating system, which became the dominant computing platform for personal computers worldwide for decades. After stepping back from Microsoft's day-to-day operations, Gates shifted his primary focus to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he co-founded and which has grown into one of the largest private charitable foundations in the world, focused significantly on global health and poverty reduction initiatives. Bill Gates's combination of his foundational role building Microsoft's personal computing dominance and his subsequent large-scale global philanthropic work has made him one of the most historically significant technology CEOs in modern business history.

• Elon Musk

  Elon Musk co-founded and led PayPal before investing his proceeds from its 2002 sale into founding SpaceX in 2002 and taking a leading investment and later CEO role at Tesla, becoming one of the only individuals to simultaneously lead major companies in two entirely distinct capital-intensive technology industries. SpaceX became the first private company to successfully develop reusable orbital rockets, dramatically reducing the cost of space launches, and Tesla under Musk's leadership grew into the most valuable automaker in the world by market capitalization despite producing far fewer vehicles annually than legacy competitors. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, subsequently rebranding the platform as X, one of the most closely watched and controversial corporate acquisitions in recent technology industry history, reflecting Musk's willingness to take on significant business ventures well beyond his original aerospace and automotive focus. Elon Musk's combination of his simultaneous leadership of SpaceX's reusable rocket program and Tesla's electric vehicle dominance has made him one of the most commercially significant and closely watched technology CEOs of the modern era.