Why working in Scotland is good for your international career prospects
When it comes to international rankings, one of the more positive things that can be said about Scotland’s financial centres is that they’re stable. While the likes of London and Shanghai have been hit, Glasgow and Edinburgh have largely remained resilient.
This is according to the widely-renowned Global Financial Centres Index, published by research firm Z/Yen, which assesses financial centres’ competitiveness based on a series of criteria including people, infrastructure and general competitiveness.
In the pre-RBS/HBOS blow-up days of 2007, Edinburgh ranked 15th, but those times are long gone. Now it’s stable at 37th – the same rank as March this year – while Glasgow has moved up a couple of places to 39th.
This all isn’t overly exciting, of course. What’s more interesting is that both Edinburgh and Glasgow have ranked highly under the more niche category of ‘transnational specialist’. What this essentially means is that the vast majority of work carried out in the financial centres is directed towards international markets.
It’s obvious that fund managers operating in Scotland would target international investments and, from a career perspective, it’s not uncommon for them to venture south of the border or take jobs internationally.
However, much of the investment operations work north of the border is carried out for financial centres elsewhere in the world, and the higher up the career ladder you get, the more likely you are to liaise with international offices.
From an internal mobility point of view, this is good news. Senior operations professionals in the past have told us that it’s common for staff – think around 20% - to make the move to places like New York (or Delaware). Perhaps this isn’t as prevalent now, but it’s reassuring to think that it’s still feasible in the future.
