Page - (000120) - in Knowledge and Networks

112 work. While earlier generations of investment bankers in the City held degrees in a diverse range of disciplines, throughout the 2000s the recruitment strategies of investment banks favored the hiring of individuals holding undergraduate—and increasingly master’s and Ph.D—degrees in numerate subjects, notably mathemat- ics and physics (Hall & Appleyard, 2009 ; Wilmott, 2000 ). This preference was driven by a growing need for numerate graduates to undertake the fi nancial model- ing and analysis underpinning the securitized fi nancial products dominating the investment banking business model in the 2000s (see also Ho, 2009 on the case of Wall Street, New York). However, investment banks have become increasingly con- cerned about the skills of U.K. educated graduates and their ability to meet the operational needs of investment banks, refl ecting wider concerns surrounding the skill sets and employability of U.K. graduates, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM subjects, on which see CBI, 2011 ; DIUS, 2009 ). As the following interviewee summarized: I guess very generally there has been actually a problem with British students coming into banking. We fi nd that they are just not coming through the interview process or screening process and I think that’s probably true across the board of most banks. (Human resources director, investment bank, London, September 2006) As a result, in an effort to enhance students’ positional advantage within increas- ingly competitive fi nancial labor markets, postgraduate education for U.K. gradu- ates entering fi nance increasingly concentrates on sharpening those numerical skills that employers feel undergraduate education has left underdeveloped, The nature of postgraduate education for investment bankers has become tailored to refl ect both the wider educational landscape of the United Kingdom in which it is situated and the labor market demands made of domestic and international new recruits into investment banking, as this example shows: Because we can’t always get the technical skills we want domestically, increasingly we hire international graduates on that basis but then recognize that we might need to invest a little more in their soft skills and their expectations about working in the City. That’s not to say we only hire internationally, not at all, but we know that the needs of analysts tends to be different depending on where they studied for their fi rst degree, so, we’ll work with talented U.K. hires to develop their technical skills, using specialist courses and that kind of thing. (Human resources director, investment bank, London, 2009) In conjunction with education aimed at meeting the regulatory clearances needed to practice as a fi nancier, postgraduate education thus serves as an important set of activities not only by facilitating the mobility of individuals into elite fi nancial labor markets but also by serving to—temporarily at least—limit their mobility and ter- ritorially and to embed them societally in the legitimate forms of socioeconomic practice associated with the international fi nancial center where they work ( London’s fi nancial district in the case of this chapter). Indeed, interviewees’ frequently com- mented on the ways in which they had to use training and orientation sessions to learn about working in other fi nancial districts in order to overcome some of this geographical stickiness, as the following example demonstrates: S. Hall