Career Tracks
Nobody draws this map for you. Most people reconstruct it badly from forum threads and a couple of coffee chats, then discover eighteen months in that the seat they aimed at was not the one they wanted.
Here is the whole thing: what each seat actually involves, how people get in, and what it opens up. Select any one to see what feeds it and where it leads.
Select any seat to see what feeds it and where it leads.
Advisory
You work on the transaction. Someone else lives with it.
Buy-side — private
You own the decision, and you are still there when it plays out.
Buy-side — public
Liquid, marked daily, and you find out quickly whether you were right.
Corporate
Inside one company, deciding what it does with its money.
Technology
The same analytical seats, different vocabulary and a shorter feedback loop.
The map is not a ladder
Almost nothing here is one-way. People move from banking to industry and back, from engineering into product, from consulting into a fund. The arrows show what is well-trodden, not what is permitted.
Timing beats preparation
Several of these recruit on fixed annual cycles that open earlier than anyone expects — PE on-cycle and APM programmes especially. Being ready in November for a process that closed in September is the most common way strong candidates miss.
The underrated routes
Equity research takes graduates directly and teaches writing better than any other seat. FP&A is a genuine door into strategy and corp dev. BizOps is the fastest way into tech decision-making without an engineering degree.
Know the seat. Now do the reps.
Every track has technical work behind it. The Labs are free drills on the concepts each one tests, and the Skills library is the same work in the format the job actually uses.