Career Conversations: Making the connection between healthcare and finance

As someone for me, who was also coming from healthcare, I didn't have a finance background, but I wanted to work in emerging healthcare finance. Having the CFA® certification gave me some sort of credibility. 

My name is Dolapo. I'm from Nigeria. I originally had a healthcare background and the CFA Program has really helped me to make the connection between healthcare and finance. 

As someone at the time who was just starting as a strategy analyst in the bank, and I was thinking if I wanted to supercharge my career at the time, what would be the best way? So in 2017, I considered a way to learn more about finance, how to broaden, deepen my skills. 

I think the good thing at the time was the bank was one that really supported training and development of the staff. So they gave us a new way to choose the certifications that you wanted to do and the bank was going to sponsor it. 

I decided to go for the CFA (Program) because it was the gold standard of education. While I had taken the first two levels at the bank, it enabled me to move between departments in the bank. 

So I was able to transfer from the strategy team in the bank to the treasury team in the bank, where I did a lot of asset and liability management. 

So when COVID hit, I knew that I also wanted to do something that was healthcare, but healthcare funding. I got the opportunity to help the government of Nigeria to cost how much they were going to spend on COVID vaccines. So the role helping to fund immunization was one that brought together my background in healthcare and my prior experience in the banking and finance. So that brought everything together. 

Learning things about macroeconomics helped me to know that this was how much we could expect from the appropriation bill of the Government of Nigeria. That also fed into the forecasts that I made and the relationship.  being able to make those types of assumptions because of the knowledge that I had from the CFA Program was very valuable. 

I very likely would not have had the trajectory that I've had if I did not do the CFA® Exams. Finance is very broad, and there's treasury, there's corporate finance, there's private equity, there's venture capital, investment banking. 

The first thing that you need to know is to know what area of finance really appeals to you, given your particular skillset, given your personality type. And when you've identified that area, I believe you can then give it all you've got. 

Someone mentioned to me that the CFA Program can be likened to a jealous partner, meaning someone that just requires a lot of time commitment. So if you decide to go into the program, be prepared to give something up because you would need to prioritize the program over, I guess, a lot of other things that you may have been doing outside work. But I guarantee you, it's definitely worth it.