We need people with vast reserves of stamina and exceptional powers of concentration to join us in Investment Banking. You will be ambitious and driven to succeed in one of the most competitive business arenas in the world; you will also be confident to deal with important and demanding people. You accept that you may have to work very long hours in pursuit of the big deal and you are ready for your personal life to be put on hold while you build your career and reputation. You’re a team player, who can stay committed and enthusiastic when the going gets tough, and you’ll also cope stoically when deals don’t come off after all and your midnight oil is burnt in vain. The first three years will be hard work, but your eyes will be on the ultimate prize of evolving into a high-profile banker.

Here we’re interested in people who want to build long-term relationships with clients, rather than being motivated by glamour, limelight or adrenalin. You must be smart and financially literate enough to build an understanding of the bigger banking picture. You also need to be someone who clients can learn to trust, backing up your financial knowledge with integrity and an absolute identification with clients’ interests. In the Global Corporate Bank, the pressure is not as relentlessly fierce as in – say – investment banking, but the fundamental link between hard work and high rewards is still there. In Global Portfolio Management, you’ll also need a keen interest in how companies work and you’ll enjoy the analytical challenges of due diligence.

In Capital Markets/Origination, the personal profile is quite similar to the people we need in Investment Banking; not only are the challenges and the nature of the work broadly similar, you also do a lot of your training together. Again, you need energy, stamina and concentration to cope with long and complex projects; you must have the personal credibility to deal with senior people, the analytical ability to produce a well-considered case - and the confidence to argue it effectively.

In Sales & Trading we need quick-thinking, competitive people who are motivated by high rewards, enjoy the intense pressure of minute-to-minute market dealing and thrive in an unstructured and unpredictable environment. You must be able to wake up very early in the morning and stay focused throughout a noisy day. You are a natural multi-tasker who enjoys dealing with twenty things at once, loves being judged on results and lives happily with risk. As an assertive and fluent communicator, you will also get a buzz out of the constant interaction with clients and colleagues. And if things don’t go your way today, you’ll bounce back tomorrow, twice as enthusiastic and ready to make some money.

This is a growth area for the bank: we hire versatile and ambitious individuals who want a professional business career that offers high earning power, exceptional learning opportunities and a structured development path. The people who work here could equally well have applied to management training schemes with any top employer – it’s just that banking offered more of the pace and problem-solving challenges they wanted in their day-to-day work. Bright and outgoing, you must have good all-round interpersonal skills and you will enjoy building relationships with clients based on trust and a solid understanding of the bank’s products. Although you don’t see yourself as a banker, you are very ambitious and you will understand the opportunities for advancement in a business area that is growing swiftly in both influence and income delivery.

As with GTS, the people who join Operations do not conform to the stereotype of the investment banker. Here we need people with strong analytical skills and a problem-solving mind-set who enjoy getting to grips with complex systems and processes – and then finding ways to make things work better. Again you have to be an expert communicator, because there is a lot of detective work involved, talking to people and understanding priorities and business challenges. Highly organised, patient and meticulous, you will enjoy tackling problems and boosting the performance of the bank. Operations may not have the obvious glamour of trading or investment banking, but the hours are a lot better and you will help to make $multi-million contributions to the success of Citi.

There are two different kinds of people working in Technology. Firstly there is the deep technical specialist who usually works in Technical Development: this is someone who enjoys programming and already knows some key languages like UNIX, SQL, Java, .net, C, C++ and C#. The chances are, you will be interested in working with a technology vendor, but the pace and sophistication of the development projects on offer at Citi are a match for any technical environment in the world. Our trading systems are a major contributor to our competitive edge and that means we are constantly improving and re-inventing them so the pace of development is just phenomenal. In Technology Infrastructure, we hire more individuals who understand what technology can do, but are more interested in dealing with people and solving problems than pure coding and programming. They may or may not have a technical degree, but they want a business-focused career. People working in TI have quite a lot in common with their colleagues in Operations.

This is sometimes known as ‘Equity Research’: advanced numerical skills and deep analytical intelligence are clearly essential in Investment Research, but there are many other less obvious demands on the analyst. When you are doing a piece of deep industry research, things change and you have to respond quickly to the new circumstances. It takes creativity as well as concentration to go from a blank sheet of paper to an authoritative investment recommendation. You have to understand what the figures are saying, but you also have to draw meaning and patterns from a potentially confusing picture; you also live with the knowledge that very large sums of money will ride on your advice. The word research itself can be misleading, because it conjures visions of dry back-room number-crunching. In fact, research analysts have to be expert communicators: as well as providing insights into investment opportunities, they are also expected to visit clients and present their case in person. In fact, Research Analysts often travel widely in their work and the best of them also build up reputations as market gurus in specific markets and sectors.