Business Travel in Finance Careers | Why, How Often & Future of travel

so you might be hoping to start a career

in finance and you might be wondering

how much travel

is actually involved in the job and what

do you actually do

when you travel and in this video i'm

going to cover exactly those topics

based on my experience working in

finance for the past six years

so you might know from my previous

videos that i work for one of the big

four accounting firms in the corporate

finance team

and there are three main reasons why

i've traveled in my career so far

and that's to work with my project team

when they're based at another location

to work with a client at their client

side and to do site visits

so that's visiting a client's factories

for example when working on a

transaction

traveling so that you can work alongside

your team does bring some benefits at

least on paper

and one of the main ones is that you'll

be much more efficient as a team

in getting things done and the reason

for this is because you can just tap

people on the shoulder and ask them

questions

review their work for example and so at

least on paper people do believe that

working in the same room

does bring benefits and so you might

need to travel for that very reason

another benefit of working alongside a

project team

is that the junior members of the team

have a better learning experience

and that's because the people they're

learning from the most senior members

are just sitting alongside them and so

they can learn by osmosis and pick up

technical points

and pick up even soft skills such as how

the senior members of the team

communicate with clients on telephone

calls etc

and so there's definitely a better

learning experience for the more junior

members of the team

and hence the case for why people should

be traveling and

sitting together as a project team

during projects another reason why at

least on paper

the project team should sit together is

that they build better working

relationships

by sitting together you'll probably have

more frequent communication

in comparison to speaking on telephones

and on teams for example

and so by having more frequent

communication you start to build

a better relationship you start to

understand what people are expecting of

you

even before they have to tell you again

building better working relationships

drives efficiency as a team and

definitely on paper at least

you should be traveling so that you can

sit together and when you get together

as a project team

you can also enjoy the evenings after

works finished

to socialize together and have dinners

together and that really helps to build

stronger connections within the team

which should lead to a better more

efficient team over the long run

and so those are the reasons at least in

theory on why you should be traveling

so that you can work alongside your

project team and now the obvious thing

to say here

is that over the past 15 months there

hasn't been any traveling for work

and working together as project teams

because of code and so

companies have invested heavily in idea

infrastructure and making sure that

teams can collaborate digitally and

so i know my firm uses ms teams and i

can see every month or two

their new features that come into the

application that help us to work

together seamlessly

so things such as being able to edit

documents simultaneously that's really

useful and that's something that

our product teams utilize a lot and so

you don't have to worry about and waste

time

sending and receiving powerpoint

presentations you can work on

one document together as a team and so

companies are investing a lot heavily

and i certainly believe that there'll be

less

trouble in the future in relation to

working together as a team one caveat to

say about this though

is i still think people will value being

together as a project team when it comes

to the social aspect of it

and so i think there will be some travel

but i think they'll be predominantly

centered around being together so that

you can build a better

personal relationship with your working

colleagues another reason why i traveled

previously

as i mentioned before was to work with

clients at the client site

and it was important to do this

sometimes because it showed that we

valued the relationship that we had with

them

and so being there physically with them

and spending time with them

really allowed us to cement that fact

now clearly since the pandemic started

we haven't been traveling to client

sites to work with clients

and i think people's attitudes to client

meetings in person will change slowly

and people will start to realize that

you don't need to within the client in

person every single time

and it might be time efficient to

actually do virtual meetings

majority of the occasions and there

still then might be a few occasions when

you do have to have in-person meetings

so the final reason why i travel was for

site visits

and so that would be visiting a factory

for example and let's say i was working

on the boys side

i'd be asking questions of the factory

manager making sure that we're doing all

the due diligence possible

representing our client at the site if i

was working on the sell side i'd be

accompanying the site manager

making sure that only appropriate

questions were being asked

by the buy side representatives and so

these site visits are really interesting

because you get to understand

how the factory operates what the

processes are what the machines do etc

and it's something really different than

the day-to-day finance job which

predominantly involves staring into a

computer screen all day

and now it comes down to the question of

how often do i travel

and it really depends on what type of

project i'm working on

and also what stage of the project we're

currently at and in terms of the m

a projects you've got the buy side or

sell side typical m a deals

and there'd be much more traveling

involved in the sell side deal because

it's a lengthier process and you're

working at the start of the deal to

prepare marketing documents and you're

working with the clients on a regular

basis

and so it goes back to the point i was

mentioning before where we'd go to the

client site and work with clients to

show

that we really value the relationship we

have with them and so

being a lengthy process so that would be

much more travel in a sell side project

on a buy side project one of the key

reasons for traveling as i mentioned was

site tours but aside from those you'd

not

really have to travel too much the other

type of project which i'd do

now and again was to write strategy

papers and those were very different

because it could mean that we were at

client side for a longer period of time

and this is similar to what the

management consulting team or the audit

department would do

but they'd be at client side for several

periods at a time which could be months

and this was certainly different to what

a typical m a deal would involve

in terms of how long we'd be away from

home would vary a lot

it could have been the case that we

travel all five days so

travel on monday morning and come back

on friday evening

or it might even be the case that we

travel just for one day

so for example we travel on a tuesday

evening and then have a meeting with the

client on wednesday morning and

afternoon

and then travel right back on the

wednesday evening itself so what do you

even see when you travel for work

in most cases it's definitely not a

sightseeing tour and you most likely

spend a lot of time just at the office

and in a hotel room

and so you can't really compare it to

normal travel at all

typically if i was doing a monday to

friday travel stint

i'd fly in on a monday morning and go

directly to the office

finish up work at around 7pm and then

i'd go straight to the hotel to have

some dinner and relax

before following sleep to get started

again the next day

between tuesday and thursday i'd

probably be working late till 8 90 pm

or even further than that and so there

wouldn't be too much time in the evening

to go around the place and

see other sites i did try and walk

around the local area to get an

understanding of the city

and the town that i was in but primarily

i'd be at the office

just doing the same work that i'd be

doing back at home

and so it wasn't too different in terms

of the actual work but it was certainly

good to get

surrounded by a different working

environment now and again

so that's how often and why i travel for

work if you have any questions please

leave them in the comments below

if you want to hear more about whether

certain myths about working and the big

four accounting firms are true or not

click on the video on the screen right

now thank you for watching and i'll see

you in the next one