I’m pondering taking some certification courses.
First, I’m from Canada and will end up there sooner rather than latter.
From your expereince what do you suggest.
I’m want to do an MBA and pair up the following courses
I would like to do the CSC-PFPC-CFP
Canadian Securities Course -Professional Financial Planner Couse----then Challenge the Certfied Financial Planner exam
2 years
or
Do the CFA Chartered Financial Analyst - in Taiwan and take it home with me
2 years
or
It depends on what you want to do. The CFA designation is more appropriate if you are looking for an investment/portfolio manager position. It is the right designation if you want to focus on investments (esp. for larger institutions)
If you want to be a planner/broker/etc. the CFP/Planner/Broker path is more appropriate. This is more suited to helping individuals.
Hope this helps.
PS - having earned the CFA designation generally takes 3-4 years to complete.
I used to write business plans for a small investment house where my boss had both an MBA and a CFA. She encouraged me to get my CFA and told me it was much more useful than an MBA degree. Go for the CFA.
By the way, why get it here? Go back home and get it.
Having both my masters and CFA designation, I can agree that the CFA designation is absolutely more useful in my daily life. Of course getting the CFA designation was made somewhat easier by the MBA. You can almost think of the CFA deisgnation as an Investment-focussed MBA on steroids.
Again this is assuming a more institutional focus and/or a more exclusive focus on investments is what you are trying to achieve. The CFP is generally appropriate for people looking to work with individuals and/or with a planning focus.
Where you sit for the CFA designation really shouldn’t matter too much (although preparation could be influenced by other factors such as ancillary review books by Stalla, etc. possibly being more difficult to get in Taiwan). The actual tests are the same the world over. And despite internal debate at the CFA Institute (and formerly AIMR) over whether it should be offered in other languages, it is still only offered in English (if you can call it that )
You can get most important training tools and books in Taipei.
We used Sweser and Stalla - which we in order to keep costs down photocopied, showing that we did not care diddly squat about the etics they tried to teach us.
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