You’re in Good Company

We recently concluded the Finance 3.0 member’s survey, and wanted to share the summary results with you, as well as announce the winners of our $50 cash prize. We hope you’ll enjoy finding out more about the types and profile of visitors to our community of over 50,000 registered members, and thousands more who've yet to sign up.

In a nutshell, you will be pleased to know that you’re in good company…

Let us start off by sharing with you with that visitors to Finance 3.0 are a very, very well educated lot. Over 80% are in full-time employment and virtually all of us have a bachelor’s, graduate or professional degree. As a matter of fact, graduate or professional degree holders represent two thirds of the audience observed.

This finding dispels the myth that Finance 3.0 is only for students. While students are the most active in Q&A discussions and are certainly the most visible part of our audience, it is clear that there is a significant bunch of employed professionals out there who are sitting back and taking in all the good things that the Finance 3.0 platform has to offer. Taken in context with the qualitative feedback we’ve received, it’s not a matter of all take and no give, but perhaps more a matter of familiarity with social media and the perennial issue of the time we can allocate from our busy lives to active social media participation and networking.

Finance 3.0 visitors work in a variety of industries and sectors, with the banking & insurance, consulting, accounting, manufacturing and real estate sectors being the best represented. This finding reflects the demand for professional financial knowledge and resources in the management and operations of both financial institutions and other business corporations at large, which we here at Finance 3.0 hope we’ve been able to fulfill.

Moving on, we asked you about your work. Most of you responded, predictably, with Finance and Account Management (we believe probably misinterpreted as Accounting Management) being your primary functional work area. However, it was also heartening to know that a good number of you worked in high profile, front and center positions in Consulting, Executive Management and Business Development.

This just goes to show that interest in Finance cuts across all aspects of the organization, and underscores its relevance in business strategy and executive decision making in today’s dynamic work environment.

We enquired about the job titles of the typical Finance 3.0 visitor. While most of you are budding middle management executives in Manager / Assistant Manager, Consultant and Professional positions, a full one third of you are senior decision makers holding titles such as CFO / Treasurer / Controller, CEO / President / Owner / General and Director / Assistant Director / Department Head.

In many ways, such a finding reflects the typical career pyramid in most large and medium sized companies, and highlights the relevance of Finance 3.0 as a resource used across mid-to-top levels of (financial and non-financial) management positions.

Probably the juiciest finding of this survey has been that of the money we each make. Tying in nicely with your outstanding education background and mid-to-top career positions that you have achieved in your respective organizations, we estimate that a good two thirds of you command a median salary range of $65,000 per annum. The remaining one third drawing at or under $20,000 - probably due to the fact that a good number of us are working and living in emerging markets across Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America where wage levels are aligned with the lower cost of living when compared with developed markets.

Remember again, that we will never divulge any details we collect in this survey (including any salary information) beyond the aggregate results exhibited here.

The next question we asked was really a repeat of an earlier question regarding the type of company you worked for, but in a different way. We felt that this was important as a checking / auditing mechanism - we are finance professionals ourselves afterall!

However being the sharp and well informed crowd that Finance 3.0 visitors are, the results largely dovetailed with our earlier findings. In this question, over half of you said that you worked for a non-financial corporation, non-profit, union, international organization, government, or other non-financial organizations.

Around a quarter represented themselves to be working for a financial institution: that is, either a commercial bank, trust company, thrift institution, insurance company, insurance brokerage, investment bank, securities brokerage or stock exchange. This contrasts with a third of you claiming to work in the banking & insurance industry in an earlier question we asked regarding the industry you worked in, so a slight difference but nonetheless still close enough.

An interesting finding that arises from this is the high representation of those of you who worked in government sector and non-profit institutions. Such professionals seeking information and resources about finance could imply the growing government role today, and in future, in managing the Global Financial Crisis, or the Great Recession as some may call it. This is a topic that the very smart Bill Wright wrote about in his piece about career prospects in government finance.

We next asked Finance 3.0 members about how long they have been in their current jobs. While a third of you said that you have worked in your current company for between 1 to 3 years, another 40% of you said, collectively, that you have been in your jobs for between 3 to 5 years, 5 to 10 years or more than 10 years. In general, this speaks to the good loyalty that many of you have with your current employers, but perhaps also some degree of volatility caused by the trying economic conditions that have forced many of us, willingly or unwillingly, to explore new pathways in our professional careers.

The staff size of organizations that Finance 3.0 members work for is pretty much split down the middle. Just about half of you said you worked for companies with less than 1,000 staff, while the other half said they worked for companies with total worldwide employees of 1,000 or more. Interestingly, just under 10% of you said that you were working for yourselves (i.e. sole proprietors), and coupled with a similarly high number of respondents who said they were the head of companies, speaks well to the can-do spirit of non-financially trained entrepreneurs seeking resources on financial management matters to help grow your business, as well as finance professionals putting a stake in the ground to set up their own professional accounting, business consulting, corporate finance and other financial advisory practice.

In our final question, we asked you about the annual sales volume of the companies you worked for. Well over a quarter of you said you worked for companies that generated $100 million dollars or more in annual revenue, but a good third of you also said that your companies made under $10 million dollars a year in sales. This speaks to the small and medium sized enterprises that drive most of the economic activity in modern economies today.

To wrap up, we have to say that we are mighty pleased with the results, and would like to thank you again for helping us get to such a great outcome. We hope you’ve enjoyed find out more about yourselves as much as we did. If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Last but not least, we’d like to congratulate our winners of the $50 cash prize for this survey – Nicole Phillips of TD Securities in New York, and Rohit Nagpal of the Reliance ADA Group in Mumbai – congratulate them!