Year Up's Investment Operations specialty trains toward skills in financial management, data management, analysis, and reporting and investment operations. Training covers financial management topics such as financial statements, accounting, financial analysis, financial forecasting, working capital, asset management and financial ethics; using Excel, PowerPoint and Tableau/Power BI to load, prepare, analyze and report data; and investment operations terminology and concepts such as types of markets, regulators, products and exchanges, the different participant players within this ecosystem, and the role and importance of business ethics.

Skills Development at a Glance: What Students Learn

• Roles of participants in the investments/securities arena and how they interact with each other
• Understand what it means to own and sell equity/fixed income in a company from the perspective of investors/issuers
• Understand key terms of a security and a securities sale as well as the different types of investment funds
• Apply principles of accounting, financial analysis, financial forecasting, working capital, and asset management
• Analyze business processes to understand issues and how to implement possible solutions
• Utilize strategies for interpreting and making business-related inferences about data
• Using data analysis tools, in Excel (i.e. Sorting, Filtering, Conditional Formatting, Charts, Tables, PivotTable, Vlookup)
• Recognize effective storytelling with data and when to use different tables and charts to drive business decisions
• Utilize Excel, PowerPoint and data visualization tools (i.e. Tableau or Power BI), to develop and present reports 

Specialty Training Focus Areas:

• Investment Operations
• Financial Management
• Intro to Data Management, Analysis, and Reporting
• Year Up’s Standard Training  

Training at Work: Typical Job Tasks

• Update daily fund pricing
• Monitor fund cash and custody activity and prepare fund reports
• Take in and execute operational requests from clients
• Process wires and trades
• Monitor to identify causes of breaks between systems
• Analyze data relating to business processes
• Communicate business process improvement requirements to a technology team
• Assist wealth managers with trust operations

Path to a Career: Training-Enabled Role Pathways

• Fund/Portfolio Accounting/Administration
• Client Services Support
• Reconciliation Analyst
• Transaction Processing 
• Wealth/Portfolio Management Operations
• Business/Process Analyst 

Example Roles Filled by Graduates:

• Fund Accounting Representative
• Portfolio Administrator
• Trade Processing Specialist
• Trust Operations Specialist