Scheduled to launch ahead of the new year, these products directly reflect our goal to build a diverse portfolio of learning products and develop exceptional customer experiences.
Performance Attribution
Beginning 21 December 2021, CFA Institute will soft launch Performance Attribution on our Learning Ecosystem, a platform already familiar to our audiences from their CFA and CIPM Program exam prep.
Designed for experienced professionals, the Performance Attribution course emphasizes the conceptual foundations of performance attribution and presentation. The course material, a subset of our broader CIPM Program curriculum, was validated as an in-demand skill through member and market surveys.
This self-paced, online experience will provide learners a deep dive into return attribution including its purpose, key attributes, and the use of suitable models, highlighting the important differences between performance analysis for equity portfolios and fixed-income portfolios. It also examines the performance impacts attributable to sponsors and managers as well as the importance of benchmarks in the attribution process.
Once they register, learners gain access to the LES and will have 12 months from their date of registration to complete the course. Learners can expect to spend 10-15 hours to successfully complete all lessons and will earn a certificate of completion.
At a cost of US$179 from launch until March 20 (after which the price will increase to the standard US$279), the course is the first in our suite of revenue-generating PL products.
After the soft launch ends in the second week of January, we will promote the new course to members serving in roles in which Performance Attribution is a required skill, excluding CIPM designation holders and audiences in mainland China. The course will also be available to the general public through our website.
Data Science for Investment Professionals
On 24 December 2021, we will launch Data Science for Investment Professionals on Coursera, marking the first time CFA Institute will offer a learning product on this platform.
By using this existing, widely available platform to share our data science specialization, we extend our reach and increase learners’ accessibility to our content.
The Data Science for Investment Professionals Specialization is for analysts, portfolio managers, relationship managers, or people who aspire to be in these roles. The course integrates technical and soft skills specific to the confluence of investing and data science.
Three asynchronous courses comprise “Data Science for Investment Professionals”:
- Data and Statistics Foundation for Investment Professionals
- Statistics for Machine Learning for Investment Professionals
- Machine Learning for Investment Professionals
Each course features a diverse mix of content type, from videos, readings, and assessments; to an interactive discussion board; to interactive labs in which to practice coding in Python and R; to interviews with practitioners who offer their real-life experience.
Pricing is established by Coursera through their subscription model, so users may pay differing prices depending on how long it takes them to progress through the course.
Rather than promote this pilot product to our existing customers, we will test Coursera as an acquisition platform. Throughout the course, learners will be directed to our enterprise site to access related and gated content. We will track the users’ engagement with this content to help us determine the customers’ relationship to us and evaluate nurture strategies.
We will use findings from the pilot’s 12-month run to inform additional product development on the platform.
As the investment management industry evolves and digital technology advances, delivering flexible learning opportunities in formats that fit our customers’ needs will help our learners upskill and reskill throughout their careers. Please look for more information about these and other PL products—including how your society can get involved—in the coming months.