It's a fiercely competitive industry and a long climb to the top if you want the big deals, but investment banking has plenty of high notes, writes Christine Long.
When the News Corp $8.9 billion acquisition of DirecTV finally went ahead in the States in December last year, Paul Uren felt an immense amount of satisfaction.
As one of the investment banking team at Citigroup in New York, he had helped the media giant forge the deal over a gruelling 12 months.
"It's very stimulating to see an industry change shape because of something that you worked on," he says.
At the time Uren was fulfilling an ambition to test his mettle in the toughest financial market in the world.
Now based back in Sydney, he describes working on Wall Street as intense: "You're working on larger deals than you would typically work on in Australia and you're getting the opportunity to compress a lot of transactions into a relatively short period of time."
In the world of the investment banker, going to work means advising companies and working with them to execute strategies such as takeovers, divestitures, privatisations and initial public offerings.
Employees work in a number of areas, from corporate finance to mergers and acquisitions, but all are immersed in companies at "defining moments" in their history.
With corporate activity tipped for further growth this year, Uren and his counterparts at Deutsche Bank, UBS and Merrill Lynch are poised for an exciting year.
The heady mix of activity was part of the attraction for Uren when he was working in strategy consulting eight years ago.
Investment banking does comes with its own frustrations, for example, spending months working on deals only to have them come to nothing. But the 32-year-old director of Citigroup's investment bank says that is just a natural part of the highs and lows of the industry.
New entrants are obviously not put off by such frustrations. Competition to get into the industry is tough. Scoring a relatively junior position requires excellent academic results or some accounting, law, consulting or industry experience.
As Meredith Lee, manager of corporate finance at Macquarie Bank, told attendees at a Securities Institute of Australia seminar last month, junior employees tend to start off drafting takeover documents or an initial public offering prospectus as well as doing plenty of spreadsheet modelling and research.
"You develop quite a broad skill base in your early years," Lee says.
After about four years they may begin to assume greater responsibility for liaising with clients, business development and transaction management.
For those keen to get ahead, it is possible to climb the ladder quickly because corporate finance houses tend not to have strict career structures, Lee says.
"It is not unheard of for quite young people to be leading big transactions."
Getting ahead requires high levels of motivation, the ability to think strategically and sound commercial judgement.
"You've got to come up with good ideas and then be able to articulate them to your client," Uren says.
An ability to thrive in what can be a very competitive environment also helps. In banks, where they are pitching for business a lot of the time, there can be competition among employees to work on good deals or in the best teams.
Amelia Hill, 27, was the last graduate trainee taken on by UBS in 2001 before the industry fell into the doldrums.
She had already worked with top 100 companies reviewing their strategic options on an ongoing basis and in a variety of transactions.
"In retrospect, it was fantastic because if you're not competing with 10 or 15 keen young graduates then you get a huge amount of exposure," she says.
For her, one of the most challenging parts of the job is the time pressure.
Long hours are often expected and deadlines set by clients and senior management must be met. She says that the long hours coincide with the most stimulating parts of the job: "When you're working that late you're normally working on something which is incredibly exciting which you're completely caught up in. You want to be there."
