Goldman’s global head of growth markets explains how investment bankers can remain employable

Goldman Sachs has been making videos and placing them on YouTube. They don’t appear particularly popular: some only have a handful of hits. Some appear to have none at all.

However, this one, featuring J. Michael Evans, its global head of "Growth Markets," deserves some attention. In it, J. Michael volunteers a perspective on what it will take to be extremely-employable in 2020: client relationships across multiple "growth markets."

Cross border transactions involving growth market countries are where it’s all going to be happening, says J. Michael. As an example: “China is very focused on Brazil and Brazil is very focused on China,” he says. ”The level of trade that exists between Brazil and China today is the same that existed between China and the U.S. five years ago.”

From this, we surmise that in-demand bankers will therefore not be those just with relationships in China, or Brazil, or Russia, but with client relationships across two or more of those countries. Intra-growth market transactions are going to be an “enormous part" of Goldman’s expansion, J. Michael explains.

Nevertheless, if you can’t muster relationships within multiple growth markets, one may still be sufficient.

In a separate video, Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs asset management, and progenitor of the term BRIC, says Western countries are going to have to export a lot more to BRIC countries in the future.

“Before the end of 2012, it’s conceivable that Germany will export more to China than its French neighbor,” says O’Neill.

He thinks the U.S. is going to export a lot more to Brazil, Russia, China and India too: “Post- crisis the U.S. has got to reinvent itself. It’s not going to be a country where  its own over-leveraged consumer dominates life the way it’s done in the past 20 years, it’s going to be a country where exporting to the rest of the world is going to be more important.”

The implication appears to be that the most employable bankers will be those who can position themselves at the nexus of new trade flows and facilitate deals resulting from them.  Maybe  more people should monitor what Goldman Sachs posts on YouTube more carefully.

Editor's note: This originally appeared on our UK site but is applicable here as well.