The first step into the Finance Industry is to know Accounting and Stock Market at a moderate level. For accounting you need books and a lot of practice (that is why MBA in Finance has been easier for commerce graduates). But those who were not into commerce, you can still do it like anyone - Basic accounting Books is the way for you. And if you are someone like me who prefer hours of video content instead of books Manoj Rajgopal Sir’s old YT videos are a great go ( I will give links to every channel at the end of the page). You can give a try to books of Dr. Anil Lamba - they are also equally good.
For Stock Market Rachana Ranade Mam’s courses are a must for any beginner. Yes, there are other cheap courses also but hers is explained in the best way possible. Form a group of friends and then take the course - cost will be reduced to per head. In her courses - you need to take up three things -
Once these are done you are all suit up to take your Finance Journey into the next level and deep into core subjects.
For this you need to learn the topics that are tied to core of the accounts and money involved in a business. (let me break this down for you). As a customer of a product have you ever wondered that how many days this company can allow me to buy the product on credit ? - sounds weired. Because no one thinks of something like this when buying a product. But wait - when you hold a job in a company, you are actually selling the product or a part of it. and here every company thinks that how many days we can give goods in credit while being profiatble and also not lossing any customer. This is called Accounts Recivables Management in the finance language. There are hundreads more topics like this. And to get all of this you need to something like an MBA or CFA(I would say CFA is better than MBA - don’t worry what they say about CFA jobs - focus on your skills - I will discuss that in a bit). But if you are not intrested in getting a degree now then you can do these topics from youtubes or other micro courses (although that it will be harder and you need to get the syllabus of MBA or CFA for it)
Now here don’t get me wrong but the naked truth is 99% MBA colleges in our country don’t teach these core finance topics in an “Connected to Industry” manner - Hence every time you learn these topics you have to make sense of it and connect it to an actual business (because your professors ain’t gonna do it). But how you put out these skills to your CV or even real world. Through Certfications !! - Nah, Thats too old school and these days they don’t carry much value either. Here I am sharing an unfair-advantage with you. The answer is Financial Model. Build your own Financial Model of a Company (and cherry on the top will be its Fundamental and Techincal analysis). Learn Financial Modelling - Choose a Company - Get the Model done in excel - show it to your professor and get confirmation - then show the work on your CV. Now you must be thinking where to start. Again I will refer you to Manoj Rajgopal Sir. He has a course called - Holistic Finance - on his website - but thats not all after completing the course you will get an Internship either in an Buy-side or Sell-side company (again what is buy side and sell side you will know once you see his YT channel) - so at the same time you are getting the skill and experinece (and this Internship will be like a real work Internship and not a so-called internship where they will teach you day-trading in exchange of selling their insurances).
For a long time now Finance industry has been driven by analytics tools like PowerBI and Tableau . So it is important to know basics of these analytics skill (and ovbiously mastering Advance Excel). These days these analytics tools are taking over most of the jobs in the industry - so don’t miss out on this. If you are having MBA from a Tier-3 college chances are high that you will end up in these analytics jobs rather than core finance jobs (I am not demotivating anyone here - whatever is fact is a fact - this is the reason you can also see your college mentors throwing analytics course links to you)
Remember Finance is a vast skill point to be an industry. Hence, it has some niche category jobs also. You are never sure if you gonna start your career in core investment job or any thing else. What I am suggesting here is not to leave Marketing just because you choose Finance as career - you should be keeping an eye on how these days companies are doing marketing and how consumers are reacting to it (again i will be leaving some YT links at the end of the page).