Portfolio Manager jobs: skills, pay and how to get hired

What a portfolio manager does

A portfolio manager, a Portfoliomanager or Fondsmanager in German ads, decides how money is invested: which asset classes, which shares, bonds or funds, how much of each, and when to change. The money may belong to a fund, a pension scheme, an insurer or private clients of a bank. The portfolio manager works within a written mandate, follows an investment process, watches risk against limits and a benchmark, and explains the results to clients or an investment committee. Investment analysts do much of the research behind the decisions.

Some titles share the words and are other work. Project portfolio managers steer a company's projects, product portfolio managers its range, and real estate asset managers its buildings; none of them is covered here. The investment banking analyst advises on deals rather than investing; the financial analyst analyses a company's own figures; the relationship manager looks after the bank's clients and brings their wishes to the portfolio; the risk manager checks the risks independently. The steps from investment analyst to chief investment officer are in the career paths of this role.

Supervisors and licences differ by country, and each country's section names its own. This page describes the work; it is not financial, legal or career advice, and nothing on it is a view on any investment.

The skills the ads ask for

We read a sample of the ads every day and count the skills they name. On a computer, hover a skill in the text to see its share; on a phone, the table has the same figures.

The core is asset allocationSplit a portfolio between asset classes and regions to fit its goal, its risk limits and its time. and investment researchForm your own view of a company, a bond issuer or a market, and test it against others'. across equitiesKnow how share prices react to earnings, rates and news, and how a stock fits a portfolio., fixed incomeKnow how bonds react to interest rates and credit, and how duration and quality shape risk. and other assets, resting on capital marketsKnow how securities are issued and traded, and what moves their prices and liquidity. knowledge, valuationValue a company or a bond and see when the market price differs from your estimate. and financial modelsBuild models of earnings, cash flows or returns that a colleague can check.. Every role adds risk managementMeasure the portfolio's risk against its limits and benchmark, and act before a limit is hit. and performance attributionExplain where a portfolio's return against its benchmark came from, decision by decision.; many ask for ESG investingApply the mandate's ESG rules to what you buy, and report on them accurately., statisticsKnow when a return pattern is real and when it is chance, and how correlations shift in a crisis. and some PythonPull and test data for screens, backtests and risk checks without waiting for a developer. for data, with ExcelBuild allocation and scenario sheets that a risk colleague can follow. everywhere.

The tools are named side by side and none is a must everywhere: market data platformsPull prices, holdings and research from a market data platform and check them. such as Bloomberg and FactSet, and portfolio management systemsRun orders, holdings, limits and reports in the firm's portfolio management system. such as Aladdin and SimCorp. Qualifications are named the same way: the CFAThe CFA programme is an international qualification many investment teams know; a record of sound decisions counts too. charter and the CAIA, for alternative investments, are international programmes that many ads mention; a record of sound decisions counts as well. The job means explaining resultsExplain to a client or a committee what the portfolio did and why, in plain words. to clients and committees, in GermanAsked for in most German portfolio ads, for German clients, funds and their documents. where they speak it and in EnglishThe working language of most investment teams, research and fund documents..

Where the jobs are, country by country

Each country below has its own figures: which cities have the most jobs in our list, whether the number is going up or down, how often ads offer remote or hybrid work, the titles used in the country, and pay ranges from published research, in the local currency.

The rules are named side by side, each with its place. In the EU, MiFID II sets how investment firms manage client portfolios, including the check that a portfolio suits the client; the German KAGB sets the rules for funds, supervised by BaFin. US investment advisers register with the SEC, the UK FCA authorises UK investment managers, Swiss portfolio managers need FINMA's authorisation under the FinIA, and SEBI regulates portfolio management in India. The firm's compliance team says how each applies to a mandate.

One investment decision, step by step

1. Mandate: the goal, the benchmark, the risk limits and the rules of the portfolio.
2. Research: the analysts' and your own work on markets, sectors and single securities.
3. Decide: the allocation and the positions, sized to the risk budget.
4. Implement: orders through the trading desk and checks against the limits before and after.
5. Review: performance attribution, risk reports and the report to clients or the committee.

The hard part comes when a well-researched position goes against you: deciding whether the facts have changed or only the price, and acting on the answer within the rules of the mandate.

Your CV for a portfolio manager job

A portfolio manager's CV goes through software that looks for the ad's words, then reaches a head of investments who wants to see which portfolios you ran, against which benchmark, with which process and risk. Give both: the keywords and the evidence.

Use the keywords the ads use

• Write the work as the ads do: "asset allocation", "portfolio construction", "investment process", "risk management", "benchmark", "mandate". The skills table above shows which keywords the ads use most.
• Name the asset classes, the clients and the size band: equities, bonds, multi-asset, pension funds, private clients.
• Show results the way the firm reports them, with the benchmark and the period, and only where you may share them.
• A level of the international CFA programme still under way goes on the CV as in progress, with the date of the next exam.

Prove each skill

A portfolio line proves itself with the mandate, the decision and how it was measured.

Keep confidential details out: no client names, no holdings that are not public, no figures your employer has not released.

How we read our data

• The jobs: the portfolio manager jobs in our job search (portfolio managers, investment managers, fund managers and the German titles Portfoliomanager and Fondsmanager), matched by their titles the way the search matches them; project and product portfolio titles are counted on their own pages. Our list is not the whole market, so we give shares and rankings, never counts.
• The skills: every day we read a sample of these ads and count the skills in them with a fixed word list. Only the counts are kept, never the text of an ad.
• Pay: from published salary research, each source named with its date, as a range from entry level to senior. Our ads are not used for it.
• Dates: every figure is worked out again each day and shows the day it was worked out.

More on the portfolio manager role