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【CFA Exam】How to become a CFA Charterholder after passing CFA level 3 exam? — Will I get penalized if I claim to be a CFA member before registration? | How to find my professional references?
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4 min readNov 9, 2023
- Within like 2 months after taking the CFA Level 3 exam, you will receive an email notification of your exam result. Unlike the previous two levels, CFA Level 3 will not provide granular score report, so you’ll only know that you passed or failed.
- If you passed, congratulations! You are only one small step away from becoming a CFA Charterholder!
- DO NOT immediately rush to update your LinkedIn profile and add the “, CFA” suffix to your name!
- Still remeber CFA Ethics? You must pay the membership fee to become a CFA Regular Member. If you pass Level 3 and immediately proclaim to be a CFA member, you may be immediately penalized or even disqualified!
- So, what you should do is to make an application to be a CFA Regular Member via the CFA official website if you have fulfilled these requirements:
- Passed all 3 levels of the CFA exams (which you have!);
- Accumulated at least 4000 hours of relevant working hours;
- Find 2–3 professional references; and
- Pay the US$299 annual membership fee
- First, fill in your relevant work experience, preferably related to investment decision making. Candidates who take the CFA exams usually work in the financial or banking industry, so there should be a certain degree of relevance to investment decision making. For example, an economic research analyst helps form the house view on macroeconomics which drives the investment decisions of fund managers; a corporate banking relationship manager advises clients on their companies’ capital structures and their financing and investment decisions.
- Next, find your professional referrers. You’ll only need to provide the name and email address of your referrers, and then your referrers will receive an email asking them to write a few points to confirm…
