“M&A analyst” attracts as much as it frightens: deals worth billions and highly exposed teams, but also weeks that spill into evenings and weekends. Between the clichés of TV series and the stories of former analysts, it is hard to know what an analyst in mergers and acquisitions really does, how people get in and what the job leads to. Here is a sober description of the role, the routes in, the skills recruiters check and ways to present this profile on a résumé.
What does an M&A analyst actually do day to day?
An M&A analyst works in an investment bank, an advisory boutique or, more rarely, in the corporate development team of a large group. They assist the teams that advise a company buying a business, selling a subsidiary or merging. Onisep 🔗, the French public careers guidance body, lists this job, under the title of mergers and acquisitions adviser, among the advisory roles that guide complex financial transactions, and mentions “M&A analyst” as a neighbouring title.
An analyst’s work falls into three families of tasks:
- Financial modelling. Building or updating the model of a target company: revenue, margin and cash-flow projections, and valuation by discounted cash flows and by comparable-company multiples.
- Producing documents. Presentation decks, anonymous teasers, information memoranda, management presentations. Much of the time goes into PowerPoint and Excel, checking every figure and every cross-reference.
- Running the process. Keeping the timetable, preparing the data room, relaying questions between potential buyers and the seller, consolidating feedback from lawyers and auditors.
The pace depends on where the deal stands. During preparation the work is steadier; in the weeks before offers are submitted or the signing, requests arrive in bursts and evenings get longer. Candidates know about these peaks, and recruiters want to know whether you have weighed them before committing.
📊 To place the role: the analyst is the first rung of a team. They produce, check and receive feedback; they do not yet own the client relationship. Our article on the differences between M&A and private equity helps compare these two neighbouring worlds.
Studies and routes in
The usual entry level is a five-year degree (bac +5). Onisep gives this level for the M&A adviser job, and the CIDJ 🔗 profile of the M&A analyst mentions a five-year degree in finance or financial engineering.
Three routes come up most often:
- Business schools, with a master’s or specialisation in capital markets, corporate finance or financial engineering. The top schools offer dedicated tracks and student clubs focused on deals.
- University, through master’s degrees in corporate finance, banking and finance or financial engineering. The path is less well marked, but graduates are hired every year.
- Engineering schools, with a finance major or a double degree: a quantitative profile is valued for modelling.
Whatever the path, internships carry a lot of weight. Many analysts first did one or two internships in M&A, in transaction services at an audit firm or in corporate finance. If you are still a student, our guide to landing a finance internship covers the calendar and applications.
⚠️ Warning: there is no compulsory degree. A less prestigious school can lead to the job, provided you have credible internships, a mastered financial model and a network built early.
Key skills recruiters look for
M&A recruiters look for precise signals, not generic lists of qualities.
Technical skills
- Accounting and financial analysis. Reading a balance sheet, restating an income statement, understanding net debt and working capital. Without this base, a model does not hold.
- Company valuation. Discounted cash flows, transaction and trading multiples, the logic of enterprise value versus equity value.
- Excel. The model is the central tool: shortcuts, pivot tables, a readable model structure, consistency checks. Our article on essential Excel skills in finance sets out what you should be able to do.
- PowerPoint and editorial rigour. A document with no typos or inconsistencies between pages is a basic requirement.
- English. Deals often involve foreign buyers or sellers.
Behavioural skills
- Reliability under pressure: delivering correct work on time, even when the schedule tightens.
- Synthesis: summarising a company on one page for a decision-maker.
- Taking feedback: an analyst reworks documents several times. The soft skills expected in finance matter as much as technique in interviews.
Interview questions test both registers: a technical question on a chain of cash flows, then a behavioural question on a pressure situation. Prepare both with our guide to investment banking interviews.
Pay at each stage
Amounts vary strongly with the size of the firm, the city, the year and the team’s performance, and figures published by recruitment sites often differ by several thousand euros. Public sources only give starting-pay benchmarks: Onisep and the CIDJ each indicate a starting salary, with gaps between them, which illustrates the difficulty well. Rather than quote a figure out of context, here is how pay is structured.
- A fixed part, paid monthly, which rises at each level.
- A variable part, an annual bonus tied to individual performance, the team’s and the bank’s. It can be significant in large firms, and nil in some years.
- Extras, depending on the employer: profit-sharing, health cover, meals or transport paid for late evenings.
To compare offers, always ask for the variable part actually paid in previous years to a comparable profile, not a theoretical amount. Our article on pay in capital markets and investment banking goes deeper by position.
Career progression and exits
The classic path in an investment bank runs: analyst, associate, vice president, director and managing director. Time spent at each level varies by firm and market cycle. Our article on moving from analyst to associate details the promotion criteria.
Many analysts do not stay to the top of the pyramid, though. Common exits are:
- Private equity, where modelling and deal-execution experience is highly sought (see becoming a private equity analyst).
- Finance or corporate development at a group, with a steadier pace.
- Strategy or transformation consulting, for those who prefer working on the substance.
- An MBA or specialised master’s, sometimes funded by the employer.
- Starting or buying a business, whose mechanics are familiar to a former M&A analyst.
💡 To learn more: if you hesitate between capital markets and a broader analysis role, read how to become a financial analyst.
Showcasing this profile on your résumé
An M&A analyst résumé must prove three things: technical mastery, participation in real deals and reliability. Applicant tracking systems first discard résumés whose structure is unreadable: favour a simple one-page layout without complex columns.
- Describe each experience by the deal, not the department. Rather than “took part in M&A transactions”, write the type of mandate, your role and the deliverable: “Built the valuation model of an industrial target (discounted cash flows and comparables) for a sale process, four-person team”.
- Respect confidentiality. Never name a non-public target or client; describe the sector, size and nature of the deal.
- Quantify what can be without revealing sensitive data: number of mandates, duration, data-room size, number of model versions.
- Highlight tools: advanced Excel, market databases, possibly VBA or Python if you really use them.
- Cite your reference training: certifications (for example those of the CFA Institute 🔗), finance master’s degrees, student clubs.
For a starting point, see our guide to writing an investment banking résumé, the M&A analyst résumé example and, to avoid classic traps, the mistakes to avoid on a finance résumé.
One point deserves separate treatment: layout. In this profession, a misalignment is a negative signal. A tool like FinanceCV’s handles layout for you, and the PDF it produces is read correctly by applicant tracking systems, which discard poorly structured résumés before a human opens them.
Ready to create your finance résumé? Start with the structure, add your deals one by one, then proofread with a recruiter’s eye. Create my résumé for free