Ask any candidate mid-way through the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) programme how it is going, and the answer is rarely cheerful. The exams are notorious for their attrition: of five people who register for Level I, popular wisdom in the industry holds, only one will eventually collect the charter.
Yet every year, thousands more sign up anyway, drawn by the credential’s reputation as a passport into serious investment work. But what really separates those who finish from those who drop off?
In a discourse put together by CFA Society East Africa, a regional association of investment professionals, Diana Nthiwa, an investment analyst at Mayfair Asset Managers in Nairobi, Kenya, and Pauline Arigye, a partner at Curium Advisors in Kampala, dissect exactly how they did it. Neither had a conventional finance pedigree. Both finished, anyway.
How did the pair end up on the programme?
Ms Nthiwa trained as an actuary, a business professional who uses math and statistics to study future risks and money problems. Ms Arigye studied civil and environmental engineering. Neither had, in their own telling, much idea what a balance sheet was before they began.
Ms Arigye’s route into finance began with an unglamorous realisation: surrounded by colleagues at Uganda Development Bank with 15 or 20 years’ seniority, she ‘felt deathly uncompetitive.’
A charterholder colleague talked her into the CFA programme.
‘It is going to be the most remarkable journey of your life,’ she recalls being told, ‘and it’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it.’
Ms Nthiwa arrived by a stranger route still; an actuarial-science graduate who, during a job interview at an insurer, admitted she was less interested in the premiums the firm collected than in where it invested them afterwards. She was describing an investment job, not an actuarial one.
Ms Nthiwa enrolled in the CFA programme at Strathmore University in Nairobi before she had even secured a finance role. ‘I didn’t have anyone around me who had done CFA before, and I wanted that community.’
Both insist the absence of a finance background was no real handicap. The curriculum, says Ms Arigye, ‘sort of teaches you how to teach yourself’, and that, more than any single technical skill, is what carries a candidate through three years of self-directed grinding.
How long does the grind typically last?
CFA Institute’s own guidance suggests candidates should budget around 300 hours of study per level. Both women blew straight past it. Ms Arigye reckons she logged closer to a thousand hours across her Level III attempts, having failed the exam twice before finally clearing it on a third sitting with the help of a paid prep provider.
Her reasoning was: ‘How do I give myself the best possible chance to succeed? And if the best possible chance to succeed required me to study three times, maybe the recommended amount, then yes, I just had to do it.’
Ms Nthiwa’s number was similarly inflated, ‘probably 600 or 700, I don’t know, I didn’t count’, and she is sceptical that the official figure means much in practice. Candidates already working in the investment industry, doing daily the sort of analysis the curriculum describes, might scrape by on less. Everyone else, her advice runs, should assume the marketing number is optimistic.
Is there a method to the madness?
Well, neither candidate found a single, universally applicable formula, but their approaches rhymed in several places. Ms Arigye’s preparation, mapped out with a mentor eight or nine months ahead of each sitting, followed a deliberate rhythm: seven months of maximum effort; six days a week, three hours before work and three after, followed by a taper.
‘In the last two months you need to start slowing down,’ she says her mentor told her. ‘Even take a break, maybe for a week; don’t study, maybe go to the beach, unwind, rest your mind.’
The final week dropped to roughly an hour of study a day, replaced by eight hours’ sleep and exercise, on the theory that a depleted brain performs badly under exam pressure.
‘The exam requires agility,’ she says. ‘It tests how fast you can interpret information, and if you’re not well rested… your critical thinking abilities are impaired.’
She also front-loaded the hardest material. ‘I always started with derivatives,’ she says, ‘because I felt if I start with a harder topic, then I give it more time for practice.’
Once a topic was covered, she kept cycling practice questions from it alongside newer material, so that by exam week the ratio of studying to drilling had inverted almost completely.
Ms Nthiwa leaned harder on outside providers, pairing Mark Meldrum’s video lectures with Kaplan’s question bank across all three levels.
‘There are no shortcuts to this thing,’ she says. ‘You’ve gotta go through the whole curriculum.’
She estimates she read roughly 90 percent of it directly, using provider materials mainly to unpick the densest sections before circling back to the source text.
Both were unsentimental about cost. Prep courses and question banks are expensive on top of already costly registration fees. To address this, Ms Nthiwa says, ‘get a group of people… cost-share…’
What are some of the best practices?
Mock exams, in both accounts, were less a rehearsal for success than a diagnostic instrument.
‘I just want to emphasise that mock exams are best utilised if they are not approached with a mindset to memorise the questions,’ says Ms Arigye.
‘They’re supposed to be a tool to expose where you can do better, where you’re struggling, and that information is all you need,’ she notes.
Ms Nthiwa offers a related warning against comparing scores mid-preparation. A poor first mock, relative to a friend’s, is not a verdict.
‘Don’t start losing hope, don’t think you’re doomed, you’re going to fail. Have enough time in between mocks and the exam. All the questions that you failed, go back to the curriculum, look at that topic, do a deep dive.’
Both candidates sat full mock sessions under real exam conditions; the same two-hour-and-fifteen-minute block, the same thirty-minute break, then a second full session, so that exam day itself held no surprises.
What the CFA charter costs you…
Neither woman pretends the process was compatible with an ordinary life.
‘CFA reading and prepping is going to take over your social life,’ Ms Nthiwa says flatly.
‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has told me they maintained their life the way it was before they started the charter,’ she adds.
The trade-offs were structural as much as social. Ms Arigye negotiated with her employer to bank her annual leave until just before each exam, buying herself a clear run-up period; she also set firm boundaries at home, warning her sister that certain hours were off-limits. Ms Nthiwa did the same at work, declining extra assignments after 4:30pm regardless of deadline pressure.
The single ingredient both credited most, though, was a study partner. Ms Nthiwa and Ms Arigye found each other through a WhatsApp study-group post ahead of Level III and ran the final stretch together, opening sessions, by their own account, with unabashed self-affirmation.
Can you further pack the programme?
Candidates are often told the levels ‘build on each other,’ a phrase that undersells how differently each one behaves.
Ms Nthiwa’s account of Level I doubles as a small morality tale. She arrived, by her own admission, overconfident; ‘I told myself, girl, you have done actuarial science, there’s nothing harder that you’ll come across’, until financial statement analysis disabused her of the idea.
A turning point came from an instructor who caught the class slacking. ‘You guys are taking this thing as a joke,’ she recalls him saying. ‘Haven’t you gone online seeing the pass rates?’
Of more than forty students in her cohort, fewer than ten passed that sitting.
The shock recalibrated her approach entirely. Level II, done largely through self-study with strict boundaries, became, somewhat to her own surprise, her easiest level, cleared above the 90th percentile. Ms Arigye locates the real inflection point at Level III, where the format shifts from pure multiple choice to include constructed-response questions. The skill being tested there, she argues, is compression as much as comprehension.
‘There was a requirement to be able to communicate your understanding of the information provided in the vignette as efficiently as possible; meaning don’t write paragraphs, don’t write stories, find a way to fit everything you’re saying into one line,’ she notes.
So what sins do candidates keep committing?
Overconfidence born of adjacent coursework is a persistent trap, in Ms Nthiwa’s telling, assuming a university course covered the same ground as the curriculum, and therefore reading it less carefully.
‘That’s a lie,’ she says. ‘The curriculum keeps on changing year on year.’
Careless reading of exam questions is another: candidates who select an answer on a first pass, without registering whether a question asks for a ‘pro’ or a ‘con,’ and only realise the error walking out of the exam hall.
Ms Arigye’s chief regret was procedural rather than substantive. She and Ms Nthiwa began their Level III discussion group in October, later than she would now advise, and found themselves scrambling for study-partner time even on Sundays. Her broader prescription for group study is to cap it at four people.
‘When you’re only four individuals or less,’ she says, ‘it allows you enough time to ask questions and ask them as many times as they need to be asked.’
Did it pay off?
Unreservedly, in both accounts, though the dividends look different.
For Ms Nthiwa, the charter changed how colleagues and prospective employers treat her; greater trust, more responsibility, unsolicited approaches from people she had never met, while she cautions that the letters alone are not the point. ‘As much as you have this charter, do you have the content, or did you just memorise your way through?’
For Ms Arigye, the payoff was structural: she left salaried employment at Uganda Development Bank this year to co-found her own advisory firm, crediting the programme directly with the technical grounding an engineering degree never gave her.