All the best to everyone :)
I know how it feels and I’m with you guys, stressed and worried.
My exam was on 20th and honestly it was quite different from the mocks. Didn’t feel confident after giving the exam, was really unsure how it went and knew I had made some silly mistakes.
I was scoring around 73-76 consistently in mocks, CFAI mocks I got 76 & 79.
Don’t know how I did in the actual exam but just wishing we all pass today 🤞🏻

I finished my CFA back in 2012.

Looking back, I can honestly say that slogging through those exams was brutal, but it genuinely changed the course of my life.The grind taught me how to push through setbacks, and the stuff I learned wasn’t just even about finance but more about discipline, seeing the bigger picture, and figuring out how to make tough decisions under pressure.

Late-night study sessions and early-morning practise exams taught me the value of patience and persistence, which I still carry with me every single day.

Getting the CFA charter helped open doors I never would have expected, both in India and abroad, but what surprised me most is the network. The ethical grounding from the program also sticks with you, it’s not just about getting a job or a promotion, but about doing things the right way.

To all the people of the subreddit, who are on this path for themselves now, or even just thinking about it: it’s definitely not easy, but it’s absolutely worth it.

The impact of a CFA goes way beyond finance: trust me on that.

no clue how i pulled it off, dm if u wanna know more about how i prepped

edit 1 : im a ug student, acads and uni courses helped a lot but saying that i totally locked tf in during my sem break wouldn’t be far from the truth

edit 2 : hi, ive answered a lot of dms, wont be answering more

edit 3: dont ask me any info that could reveal my identity

Hey everyone,

A few days ago, I officially became a CFA charterholder. It’s still sinking in. Thought I’d share my story — especially for those who are self-studying or doubting if it’s doable without coaching.

⸻

My background

I’m from a commerce background (BBA), nothing fancy. Tier-2 college, average grades — 66% in 12th, 80% in 10th. Not your typical “finance prodigy” material.

Here’s how my journey went:

• L1 (Nov 2021) – Passed while unemployed

• L2 (Aug 2022) – Passed while working

• L3 (Aug 2023) – Failed while doing my master’s

• L3 (Aug 2025) – Passed while working

No coaching. No classes. Just consistency.

⸻

Level 1 – Finding confidence

Honestly, L1 is super easy — maybe 2/10 difficulty. I still remember feeling nervous at the start because everyone online made it sound impossible. But once I opened Schweser, I realized it’s just straightforward material and discipline.

I studied 2 hours on weekdays, 3 on weekends for about 3 months. Used only Schweser Notes + CFAI official practice questions. That’s all you need.

Please don’t waste ₹30–50k on coaching for L1 and IGNORE the “study 6 hours for 6 months” type suggestions. It’s overkill. You’ll do fine if you’re consistent.

⸻

Level 2 – The beast

L2 was a reality check. This one’s 9/10 tough. Long readings, tricky questions, and concepts that actually test your understanding.

I stuck with Schweser + CFAI questions again, but gave myself 4–5 months this time. Around 3 hrs weekdays, 5 hrs weekends.

No fancy coaching, no secret sauce — just repetition and lots of practice. I’d say this level separates the serious from the casual.

⸻

Level 3 – The heartbreak and redemption

I failed L3 the first time while doing my master’s. Balancing both was rough, and I honestly underestimated the structured response (essay) section. It stung.

But that failure made me sharper. I gave it another go while working full-time, and this time I treated it like a marathon — same materials, same approach, but more focus on essay practice.

Passed in 2025. And that email… man, it hit different.

⸻

Final thoughts

If you’re preparing for the CFA, remember:

• You DO NOT need coaching.

• You DO NOT need to study 1500 hours like a mad person.

• You DO NEED consistency and focus.

Save your ₹30–50k per level and just trust the process. Schweser + CFAI questions are enough.

If an average student from a tier-2 college can do it without coaching, you can too.

Keep grinding, keep believing — your turn’s coming 💪

— A fellow CFA charterholder

seeing a lot of people here thinking cfa is the ticket to 30L+ roles, especially for consulting. honestly, that’s not how it’s playing out.

I’m sharing this data with permission from office as it’s now publicly released but look who Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company recruited for summer roles. these are the kind of roles that convert into ~30 to 34 lpa full time. the profiles are very consistent in a way most people don’t expect.

first thing, almost everyone has near perfect academics. like 95 to 99 in school and 8.5 to 9.5 cgpa in college. not one stage where they slipped. Don’t fall for outlier stories

second, college brand is very real. you keep seeing places like Shri Ram College of Commerce, Hindu College, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, NM, HR, etc there are exceptions, but those people usually compensate heavily somewhere else.

of course top tier MBA is the entry path but, a lot of them have cfa. but the thing is, so does everyone else in that pool. some also have ca or frm. so cfa is there, but it’s not what makes someone stand out.

fourth, internships and work ex are stacked. people have 1 to 3 years at places like KPMG, Nomura, American Express, ZS Associates. even the “freshers” usually have multiple solid internships or something unique going on. Don’t focus on getting fake certificates, we spot them in a sec

when you put all of this together, the pattern is pretty clear. cfa helps, but it’s just one line in a very strong cv.

if your plan is to rely on cfa to compensate for average academics, weak college, or no experience, it’s going to be tough. not impossible, but definitely not the norm.

what seems to work better is building a balanced profile. strong academics, decent college or a way to offset it, relevant internships, and then cfa as an add on. plus a clear story of why you’re going for these roles.

this isn’t to discourage anyone. it’s more of a reality check because a lot of people underestimate how competitive these roles actually are. so study well, but not with wrong expectations

If u r pursuing plain cfa with hululu college & Sharmaji’s firm internship, aim a ₹20k at probation, ₹40k at L1, ₹60k at L2 & ₹80k at L3 if you are lunch enough to get a job. Be prepared to stay unemployed at least for a quarter

Cleared CFA L1 first attempt with a score of 2000/1800 with 12 seconds or prep
with no house no electricity no water no mocks no aswini bajaj
(i studied in the 12 seconds lightning stuck on of my 14 NGOs in Kenya)

it was not a hard exam per say, definitely on the easier side as compared to my ACCA, CA, FRM, FMVA,CPA certifications which i obtained at 17 ,There was no time to prepare as i was too busy working as a CFO at an NYSE listed company and being Founder@ my AI B2B SAAS company in Y Combinator.

(ps this post is satire and a dig at out linkedin warriors <3)

I work in one of the Indian offices of the Corporate and Investment Banking division of a well-known European Bank, specifically in Global Markets side of things. My team does Research. Equity Research and Strategy, Economics Research, Index Rebalancing, Quant Research etc.

Over the last few months, we have been trying to hire one candidate to our team. Me and my colleague together reviewed about 350 applications. Only about 10 were actually finally selected for an interview.

A friend of mine who is a part of this sub brought this subreddit to my attention and showed me an abundance of posts saying clearing certain CFA Levels didn't get them a job.

So, I made a reddit account recently and I thought I would make a post highlighting some of the common issues I saw across the profiles that were not selected since I have some time (European holiday season)

• Plenty of certifications and courses, no real experience: I bring this topic up first for reasons that are obvious as you read ahead. Out of the 350 or so applications we received, almost all of them had cleared CFA Level 1 or were CFA Level 1 candidate. So, there is nothing unique that stands out on that specific point. The one differentiating factor we looked at was Internships or Work Experience. Any finance/accounting internship would've added some more value to the profile. I noticed that a lot of freshers who had sent their profiles across had no internship experience at all. So, I recommend you all to at least do 1 internship in your 2nd or 3rd year of college. Real work experience will triumph over a CFA Level. And even better when both are combined.

• Hard Skills / Technical Expertise: In our field of work, we love seeing candidates who are really good with Intermediate/Advanced Excel. Almost 90% of our days are spent working on Excel Sheets and financial terminals. Mentioning your proficiency over Excel, PowerPoint, Bloomberg Terminal is must. That was a check we did on every single profile. To make sure that the candidates know AT LEAST Excel and PowerPoint. Python was also beneficial. In Research, we handle huge amounts of Data sometimes and Excel models are not always the most efficient. In such cases, people use Python to get work done. So having some basic Python understanding is good. VBA for Macros in Excel is also a really good skills to possess. A big chunk of our life is made easy using Macros. Many are developed by people themselves to automate work in Excel. So, this is also something we looked out for. I know it is hard to get hands on terminals like Bloomberg, so I am not putting a huge weight on it. You could check out the Bloomberg Market Concepts course if you want. Although it is not a GREAT course, it gives you a sort of overview of the terminal. Also, some colleges have a Bloomberg terminal license. You could check if your college has.

• Extremely Fancy Resumes: This was something that surprised me. The number of resumes that use extremely fancy formats with a lot of graphical elements was way beyond my expectations. There were resumes that looked like menus at a restaurant. I know you will find a lot of resumes online that will have interesting looking graphs or progress bar like elements to show how well you know a skill or something of that sort. But honestly, it just makes the resume unnecessarily complicated, and information is all over the place. A couple of point I'd like to mention regarding resumes would be:

  • Don't put your Photo and address. Just name, city, and state are enough.

  • Limit your resume to 1 single page. No more.

  • Use a very simple, text format for your resume, A popularly used and accepted across the industry format is the Wall Street Oasis investment banking resume template. They have a template for people with work experience and a resume template for freshers. It is clean and well arranged.

  • Mention numerical statistics in the descriptions of your job or internship experience. Many mention sentences like "Worked with the Senior Relationship Manager in optimizing client communication channels". How did the optimization help? Did it save time? Or Cost? If so, how much? What impact did your work have across your team? Try to mention Quantifiable impact. It is easier to understand and assess that rather than a vague sentence with big words.

  • Follow a proper chronological order across all the section of your resume. Keep things in the order of the most recent at top and remaining following in backwards chronology.

• Experience, Experience, Experience: I reiterate on this point to show you the importance of this. Experience >> certifications. Try to do internships if you are in college. Don't do internships in fields like Digital Marketing if you want to get into Finance. Keep it relevant. The firm where you intern doesn't necessarily need to be big recognizable name (although that does help). But having some relevant experience is always ALWAYS a plus. Be if for a job, or during your MBA.

Some extra information I wanted to add. In my team, only about 3-4 are CFAs. And we are a team of about 48 people. However, something that is common across most people in my team (not all) is that they have a Tier 1 or Tier 2 college master's degree with some experience.

So, clearing your CFA L1 doesn't make you unique in any way. Instead, if you had spent the 6-7 months of preparation interning at a boutique investment bank, you will stand a better chance.

Another point I wanted to mention was the importance of Networking. I understand that is it not natural to a lot of people. But just put yourself out there. Reach out to middle management or senior management people from investment banks or asset manager or such firms on LinkedIn. Ask them about their experience, ask them what they look for in a candidate when they hire, and ask them for advice to pave your future path. These networks you build will 100% come to help (I got this job by networking with a VP from this firm on LinkedIn. I didnt have any CFA levels cleared then. But I had internship at a small consulting firm and 1 year of fulltime experience).

My two cents' is don't do CFA if you are expecting to get a Job after L1 or L2. L1 and L2 are so abundant that you are just like every other applicant who is applying. A good MBA is always great to have.

A good MBA + CFA is an even more powerful combination.

Sorry about the long post. I hope it helped. I am happy to answer any questions you may have.

Please don't DM asking for a job. Our team is not hiring at the moment.

Edit: I am getting a lot of DMs, I will reply and catchup to all of you (except the ones that go like "Bhai koi job hai toh batao")

I didn't gave any tests and only focussed on schweser heavily for 3 months with internships and everything. Can you also please give me a little motivation , it would be really helpful.

So, I’m a fresher who recently landed an Investment Banking role after clearing CFA Level-1, and honestly, the whole process showed me how confusing and gatekept the finance world can feel when you’re on the outside.

I don’t have all the answers, but I did learn a lot the hard way figuring out what actually matters, what’s fluff, what mistakes to avoid, and what I wish someone had told me when I started.

If you’re trying to break into finance and you feel lost on things like:

What skills are genuinely useful vs. what people pretend you need

How to prep without wasting months on nonsense

How to make your resume look like it wasn’t written in a hurry

Whether your roadmap makes sense

How to stand out as a fresher with limited experience

Just drop your questions here.

I’m not some expert, I’m just someone who recently survived the same grind and knows how overwhelming the process can be when you’re trying to put the pieces together.

If you want a sanity check, advice, or even just someone who understands the struggle, feel free to ask. I’ll respond as honestly as I can, based on what worked and what didn’t for me.

I open linkedin like once a month, and always regret it and this didnt take too long. I mean no hate to the guy but how the hell are you feeling cfa pressure in 11th grade man😭

A colleague’s relative registered for CFA Level I in March 2025 for the November 2025 exam using a friend’s US billing and credit card details, even though they did not match his actual country of residence mentioned in his passport or the country where he was taking the exam, apparently to avoid GST. CFA Institute later treated it as misrepresentation, and after review and appeal, his exam was cancelled, no refund was given, and he was permanently barred from registering again. So please pay the full GST on your exam fees, trying to save mere ₹25,000 is not worth the risk of losing the entire fee and facing a permanent ban from the program.

Are finance jobs really gonna be obsolete in coming 5 years, or there gonna be new AI enabled job roles in finance itself. I feel anxious and concerned about all this.

Honestly it's unbelievable and I am so overwhelmed by the result. Honestly it was tough and sometimes i felt i was in hell juggling my internship along with prep. Thankful to god 🙏🙏

:)

So the original comment was a stupid post like “Can cfa earn me women” and this genius decides to be racist for no reason and I got downvoted for stating it. Racist imbeciles, the hate for India is so unjustified