I think you are perhaps rather cornered, for a number of reasons:
- In the eyes of a hirer, you essentially have no work experience
- It would take a material amount of time and effort to train you up, into any job (often employers, especially those replacing staff, want hires to come in and ‘hit the ground running’)
- You are probably over-qualified (academically) for just about any banking/finance job I can think of.
- When I used to interview candidates (here, in London, and in NY) for banking roles, I would not have invited you in. The reasons for that would be because you’re clearly extremely well educated, but it’s at a point where you ‘know everything, and yet nothing’. It reminds me of the Ivy League interns we had each year, MBA students from Harvard, Yale and so on who could not (or would not) work the photocopier, that all the rest of us had to. Just you’re maybe 3 degrees further down that path.
- If I hire an 16 or 18 year old, a person straight out of school, hungry to progress, there’s a decent chance he’ll make a go of it and be ok putting in the occasional 80-100hr week (like the rest of us). If I hire a 30 year old, married, already has a
condo, no experience guy... where is the hunger? I speak from personal experience, as I was spat out of Wall Street at 31, in favour of (words etched in my memory) ‘a young thruster’ (by when I had 12+yrs exp, and was still doing 12hr days. But now looking back, I think you cannot underestimate the extreme commitment/hunger of new-hires. The rewards can be ‘ok’, but it is a very very, very, brutal game).
- A lot of mainstream people in banking are done and spat out by 30. This goes back to the hours required (as above), and that people get older, they get wealthier and... well, less ‘hungry’. It is really only the super-stars who have much hope in finance beyond 30/35.
As frank as it might sound, I mean this in the most constructive way.
Have you considered discussing this with a head-hunter/employment agent? I’d have thought it better to define plausible paths, than potentially trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. ‘My wife wants me to go into banking’ could well be the 180 degree wrong way of approaching this. I have no doubt that there is some path that would be ideal for you, it is just a case of trying to identify it.