Ares private credit junior says she works 11-hour days
Private credit firms such as Ares Management might be in a bit of a golden era for compensation at the moment, but there’s one area where the firm is as typical as any other in finance: the long working hours.
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Speaking to students on a webinar about the firm’s 2025 summer internship, an Ares direct lending (a team within private credit) associate "Selena" shared that, on a typical day, she would wake up at 8am, work for an hour before getting into the office at 9:30am, and only leave the office for home at 8:30pm.
An 11-hour day is pretty typical in investment banking. If anything, it’s on the lighter side for a junior to be working – earlier this year, for example, junior bankers complained that their hours had once again become “intolerable”, and that they were “easily” working over 100 hours a week again. Even assuming Selena worked all seven days of the week, which Ares wouldn’t have let her admit on a call to students, that comes to “only” 84 hours a week. Practically light work in comparison.
What does Selena’s day involve? She didn’t go into too much detail for the students, but most of the same stuff that any other finance junior gets up to: hammering on Excel sheets to create “the” financial model, “overlay the potential debt structure assumptions”, that sort of thing. And then meeting with more senior members of the team (vice presidents and principals at Ares) to be told what to change.
Pretty typical day in the life compared to a private equity or real estate, really.
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