Singapore’s aspiring bankers skip class to ‘stack’ internships

SINGAPORE – When BNP Paribas offered Mr Aloysius Kang a six-month internship, he withdrew from his Singapore university classes in the middle of the semester to take the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

Mr Kang, who started his stint at the bank in March, has spent two semesters away from school to gain more direct exposure to the finance sector.

The 24-year-old accountancy undergraduate, who will likely graduate later than many of his classmates at Singapore Management University (SMU), is part of a growing trend of students here reshaping their tertiary education to accumulate coveted work experience.

It even has a name: internship stacking.

“It’s worth it in the long run,” said Mr Kang, who despite taking only one class last semester had to pay the full $5,750 in school fees. “The job market is tough now so this has given me a starting point for my career.”

While there has long been intense competition among students in places like London and New York as they jostle for openings to build their work portfolio, Singapore’s aspiring bankers are going a step further by postponing their graduation by months or years.

In the city, which has expanded as a wealth hub catering to rich families across Asia as Hong Kong battled a downturn in investment banking, it is common to do multiple internships prior to graduation.

“Graduate recruitment is so competitive that internships are where you can get the foot in the door,” said Ms Corrine Ong, director of careers and employability services at SMU. When she began in the higher education sector almost 15 years ago, internships were rare.

Now students at the university do as many as eight. “Unfortunately, it’s become a chasing game,” she noted.

Goldman surge

The case is more intense than ever for those seeking finance jobs in bulge-bracket banks like Goldman Sachs Group and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The firms saw a surge in applications for internships.

Goldman Sachs had 31.5 per cent more applications in Singapore for this year’s internship programme compared with 2023, after roughly flat numbers for the past few years. The bank received more than 5,000 applications for the 2024 programme, giving it a 1.4 per cent acceptance rate, according to a spokesperson.

JPMorgan received 493,000 applications for 4,000 slots globally, Ms Mary Erdoes, head of asset and wealth management, said at the bank’s investor day in May.

In the Asia-Pacific, it has seen a year-on-year increase of about 15 per cent in the number of applicants for 2024 summer internships, said Mr Brandon Coate, Asia’s head of new joiner experience at the bank.

Said Mr Eric Sim, a career coach and former UBS Group banker: “There’s a new level of competitiveness.” Over the years, it has become evident that those with internships are more likely to get a return offer, especially in banking, he added. This trend leads students to think that if they do more internships, they will have a better shot at landing a job.

Ms Emma Lee, a new business graduate, said she has a spreadsheet to keep track of the internships she has applied for. In her undergraduate years, she completed six, from three-month stints to six-month ones. “Some of these big names only offer six-month internships,” said Ms Lee, who previously took time off from school to intern with BNP Paribas. In her final year, the 23-year-old sent out more than 20 internship applications and heard back from four.

Ms Lee, who is now interning at a bank, had to cram seven classes – nearly double the usual number – in her final semester just to graduate on time.

Job hunt

The moves by companies to temper entry-level hiring have only further fuelled the competition for internship seekers. That is especially so in fields like finance, which has cooled dramatically amid industry-wide layoffs.

Citigroup’s workforce in Singapore has shrunk by about 500 people amid a global restructuring, The Straits Times reported earlier in July.

Deutsche Bank and HSBC Holdings also joined global rivals in making several rounds of job cuts in Asia due to a slump in deal-making in the region, Bloomberg News reported.

“We are feeling the lagged effects of Covid-19,” said Mr Joel Foo, lead of corporate and transaction banking at recruitment company Ethos BeathChapman, with companies that went on a hiring spree post-pandemic now cutting back.

And competition is tough across all the financial institutions, not just the bulge-brackets, Mr Foo said. For each job posting in the finance sector, there are hundreds of applicants.

Fewer new business graduates in Singapore found employment in 2023, according to the latest joint university graduate employment survey released in February. About 88 per cent of fresh graduates in business in the labour force secured full-time permanent roles in 2023, down from 91 per cent the year before.

Ms Ashley Lim, a 23-year-old economics undergraduate, has taken a semester away from school to do an internship – as well as juggled another part-time one with night classes. She will graduate in November 2025, a semester behind her peers who are expected to do so in May.

With many fellow students now having plenty of internships under their belt, Ms Lim said her portfolio “needed something extra to be more competitive”. BLOOMBERG