An Alphabet Soup of Financial Designations
Last Saturday, a record 250,000 people around
the world sat to take one of the grueling 6-hour-long exams offered in the CFA®
program, which is 11% more than last year. With a 10-year average pass rate of
44%, these exams are widely considered to be among the toughest in the
industry. Worst of all, you need to pass three levels of exams before you’re
eligible to hold the Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA). The exams are offered
only once (or twice for the first level) a year, so it can take the better half
of a decade to get through all of them. But the CFA® designation is only one of
the growing number of professional designations in the financial industry. The
proliferation of professional designations has sparked a debate on the value
that these programs bring to the industry. In some ways, the number and variety
of designations have had a dilutive effect on the perception of their value.
Many of the CFA® candidates last Saturday, who were sitting in their testing
center staring down the barrel of a 120-question exam on a perfectly sunny
summer weekend day, must have been wondering, “Is this really worth it?”