Are all these investment ops jobs heavily weighted towards juniors?

It makes for a nice positive headline - BNY Mellon, BlackRock and State Street all unveiling relatively plentiful recruitment sprees amid a generally healthy job market within investment operations.

However, are the majority of the roles being created fairly low-paying junior roles? Maybe so.

Recruitment sources in Edinburgh suggest that most of the roles they're seeing in investment operations are at the two to three year experience level, and pay between 24-30k.

In itself this wouldn't be too much of an issue, except this particular band is among the most difficult to hire for, and therefore these roles are transmogrifying into graduate positions to make the recruitment process easier.

"The problem at this level is convincing people to switch jobs," says one financial services recruiter. "Most firms are still refusing to bump up salaries by anything more than 500 a year, and unless someone is disenfranchised in their current role, it's not worth the risk making a sideways move."

Perhaps part of the reason why firms are more inclined to recruit graduates is that it's decidedly less challenging to convince them to take up these roles.

Alan Thornburrow, chief executive of Scottish Investment Operations, remains convinced that there's a healthy spread of senior and middle management roles and junior positions as a result of these hiring announcements, but says graduate interest in the sector is growing.

"Every time a large recruitment drive is announced, we've been contacted by local university careers centres, which have students eager to take up the roles," he says. "There's a greater awareness of investment operations careers among Scotland's graduates."