The skills you need for a career in M&A

A career in M&A is appealing to just about everyone. High pay, high prestige, excellent exit opportunities – it’s not a hard sell. But is a career in M&A for everyone? What skillset do you need to thrive?

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You’ll need to be able to work autonomously. “M&A analysts are expected to get up the curve in terms of financial analysis and technical skills in a short period of time, and the role also requires a degree of independent and proactive work (for example reading broker notes) to stay current on the market environment,” a member of the global M&A team at Morgan Stanley told us four years ago. That was a while ago; AI can help with that now by summarising facts and integrating it into pre-existing worldviews (such as a model built by your bank's researchers).

Speaking on the M&A Science podcast, Avinash Patel, a partner at M&A investment banking boutique PJT Partners, said that the analytical part of the job doesn’t just mean adding one plus one. He asks his junior bankers a simple question: “why are you adding one and one together? And how is it helping our client to understand a problem?”

M&A careers involve long hours. Our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report found that M&A bankers have, for the last four years, worked 68 or so hours a week on average. That number is much, much higher than any of its fellow job categories. That requires stamina. An M&A banker we spoke to a few years ago said that she was usually in the office from 9am to midnight, a 15 hour workday – implying a 75-hour work week, if she isn’t working on weekends. She probably is.

Along with good analytical skills, a strong work ethic and a good attitude are therefore essential. “A good banker needs to be committed to the job and the deals they are working on,” said John Hannon a few years ago, head of UK M&A for UBS, who also notes that a good attitude is vital. “It is essential to maintain a positive attitude as you are constantly interacting with others; a bad attitude could be detrimental to the whole team.” Hannon also says a sense of humor is important, although that probably won’t be enough on its own.

As an analyst starts to climb the ladder, their career evolves in many directions. “This is a career that celebrates achievement by changing your role,” Goldman Sachs’ head of entertainment banking, Aaron Siegel, told Business Insider last year in June.

“As an analyst, you spend two or three years mastering modelling,” Siegel said. “As an associate, your task is to oversee the narrative of presentation materials. And once you master that, you are then moved into a new role as a VP managing projects and the day-to-day work with clients.”

Patel said that, at PJT, the difference between a VP and an analyst or associate is not just executing the deal as we noted above by “adding one plus one”, but also “taking all of that execution, but putting insights, advice, and tactics on top of it."

As a senior banker, this responsibility grows beyond just the deal you are working on too - you need to have a broad view of the industry as a whole. “If a client needs to know what the industry landscape looks like, we should be able to show up and talk about who are the different players, who's up-and-coming, who's struggling, and who's valued how and why,” Patel explained. “You cannot show up and give a cookie-cutter response... Every specific situation dictates a different piece of advice, and that takes time, effort, and thinking. It’s a constant Rubik's Cube – you got a new one every few minutes to solve."

Even later in your career, your life and job slowly begin to merge into one. Managing and developing client relationships is the name of the game. Siegel, who is a managing director, noted that he goes for a run in Central Park in the morning – if he’s up early enough – and uses the chance to call and catch up with ongoing projects in Europe and Asia.

Patel explained that, even when you “don’t have relationships”, you can build them quickly. “When you're a junior banker, you're working on deals, there's going to be a counterpart at the company that you're probably all just in the mud together while the senior people are talking higher-level concepts.” All of those people on that team will end up somewhere, Patel explained. “If you just do a good job and are a good junior deal team member, you've actually slowly started building a network."

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