It seems that everyone who isn’t answering the phone at a financial company is a VP, a Vice President. Is there a reason for that? I’ve seen jobs which elsewhere would be a lead position or a first line supervisor, but in the financial world they are a VP.
Even my broker is a “first vice president”.
A friend of mine was at a large insurance company, and he was a VP, the next job he got in another industry he was a director and got a small raise too.
Is there any rationale for this? Is this to impress the locals at the country club that everyone is a VP? Because it doesn’t seem to denote they are an executive with the company and certainly how an officer of the company.
So are all the non-VP jobs at financial and insurance companies entry-level professional jobs?
It’s also been historically true at ad agencies. You have to be a bit above entry level to make VP (not to mention all of the iterations above that – Senior VP, Executive VP, etc.), but most agencies have a lot of VPs.
Most of those people are trying to attract clients and more clients will be attracted by more prestigious titles. If you are trying to decide who to invest your money with, would you rather go with the Broker Trainee or the Vice President? Since handing out fancy titles costs nothing and helps to attract business, financial firms tend to do freely.
My former BIL worked for a large IT consulting firm, and he was a VP. He explained that the large corporate customers he dealt with felt more confident when their counterpart was a VP.
It depends a bit. I worked at a large insurance company that had tons of levels. I was a “Manager” and reported up to a “Director” who reported to a “VP”. After that there were maybe three or four levels of “VP”.
At large financial services company I consulted for, the lowest level I met was “Associate VP”. She was a glorified admin in her 30s who took care of some of my logistics stuff. Most of the group were “VPs” who reported up to an Sr VP, which was really the first level of actually having a “group” to lead with a budget and headcount and all that.
My old consulting firm, they periodically inserted and removed levels. For example, when I started it was:
Sr Managing Director (equivalent to a “partner” at a law firm or Big 4)
Managing Director (the first real “executive” role with real profit sharing, sales targets, PnL responsibility, etc).
Director
Manager
Sr Consultant
Consultant
Later, they removed the “Manager” role, so I ended up getting promoted to “Director” from “Sr Consultant”.
Sometime after I left, the firm had a glut of “Directors”, so they inserted a “Sr Director” role between “Director” and “Managing Director”.
There are many reasons companies do this IMHO:
Flat organizations - There aren’t a whole lot of real executive roles in a company where you lead an entire department or division. So if you employ smart, ambitious people, they like to think after 5 years they are not just some bottom-level peon.
LinkedIn - Related to #1, everyone can see what your title is now, so everyone wants to look like they are important.
Most people at investment banks, consulting firms and similar professional services firms are well paid. I was making well over $100k in consulting in my early 30s. Investment bankers make even more with their large bonus. So in many ways, it would seem silly to not have an impressive title if you are meeting a client in a company who may actually not make as much as you do.
“Title bumps” (giving someone an impressive new title without any real increase in compensation or responsibility) don’t cost the company anything
That’s different. An “officer” of a corporation has a specific legal definition and are typically appointed by the company’s board of directors to run the company. CEO or Chief Financial Officer for example.
That’s actually a good strategy for customer service. Because when people tell stories of problems they had with service, they always talk about how they got an obstacle removed naming some puffed up title they interacted with.
Reminds me of years ago they started calling everyone an associate. Which I think use to mean they were nearest to being a partner in the firm. But everyone became an associate.
You are right! I have a friend who had been working at an ad agency for over 10 years and he did exactly the same job as when he started, but they kept increasing his title.
So with title inflation, you aren’t a real executive unless you are at the C-level, such as CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, etc. Everyone else in the middle is really a manager/team leader, and the rest are entry-level staff.
It’s so hard sometimes to figure out what authority someone actually has when looking at a company directory.
When a worked at a brokerage, a lot of the salespeople were listed as “vice president.” This wasn’t strictly allowed – a VP in the securities industry was strictly defined as someone in a management position. We were able to get around it by calling it “vice president/sales.” If you left out the slash, the compliance people would tell you to stop.
As a VP he had authority to sign certain things and take certain actions (although IIRC the only practical things were signing leases and dealing with the attorneys in legal issues.)
The big shots at our biggest client didn’t want to deal with a puny general manager. In fact, some of them didn’t want to bother with a mere vice president, so the owners ended up giving him one percent of the stock so he could be a “partner.”
Once a certain usage has established itself as the industry standard, your company will want to follow that. Otherwise clients will be confused, because when they meet people in the industry they will assess their job titles against the usual practices they’re used to. So it is not as if clients of, for instance, investment banks (where this usage is very widespread - a couple of years ago, Goldman Sachs was reported to have 12,000 Vice Presidents globally) are impressed when they hear that the person they’re talking to is a Vice President - these clients know perfectly well what a Vice President is and does, and that the title does not denote membership in the highest echelons of the company. Quite to the contrary: It is precisely because these clients know what a VP is that financial institutions choose to keep using the title - because it makes the actual rank and importance of the title holder clear to everyone involved.
Other industries have different usages. In law firms, for instance, a Vice President would be called a senior associate or something along these lines.
Partly for cosmetics, partly for practical reasons.
Most of it is cosmetics. If you go to a for profit college, you will have the honor of meeting with a VP of admissions. Makes it sound better, makes you think that you are getting better treatment. It wasn’t just some random employee that processed my application, it was (one of) the VP(s).
But, there are practical aspects as well. The higher you are, the fewer people you are answerable to, the more latitude you have in making decisions. An employee, or a manager, or even a general manager may not be able to approve the terms that you are looking for, but a VP may be able to.
As a client, I would rather deal with a VP, because the perception there is that they don’t have a boss that may override or unapprove the deal that they made with me.
I believe that. VP at Goldman Sachs (or any investment bank) isn’t that senior of a role. Think of 28 year old Pattrick Bateman and his friends from American Psycho. Typically “Managing Director” is the investment banking role where you are actually running a group and have real executive power.
In the consulting industry, more and more, I’m seeing the title “principal” or “principal consultant” as the meaningless senior-ish sounding title du jour. Traditionally, a principal has been roughly the equivalent of “partner” (mostly in accounting or law firms), but without holding ownership or equity or other headaches that could entail. In my small (boutique) firm, it’s the most senior mostly -account management and business development role under the three founders/managing directors/equity partners.
Before that, there was the title of “managing consultant”, which sounds fancier than the more pedestrian “manager”.
A title of Vice President does not mean someone is an officer. An officer is an officially designated position within a corporation, typically a handful of those at the very top.
Regardless of whether someone is an officer, company policy can be written to give certain types of authority of certain positions. Policy could give a VP authority for expenditures within a budget, for example. In another example, in a large federal contracting company I worked for, company policy was that only a contracting officer could commit the company to a contract. If the CEO of the company signed a contract, it was worthless because he was not authorized by the company to do so (I had not seen this tested in court, however).
Sometimes such industry standards even drive other, more correct, practices out of usage. I used to work at a public sector entity - a central bank - where the official title of the second-in-line of the overall institution was the literal translation of Vice President. That title was established by statute and so legally soundly based. Nonetheless, there was an internal policy never to use the term “Vice President” in English to refer to that person, because it would sound like the public sector-equivalent of a much inferior role in the financial industry. The guidance was to use “Deputy Governor” instead.
In the investment bank I work for, even run-of-the-mill Managing Directors are getting to be a large group. Group heads will specifically have their title listed as “Managing Director and Head” or “Head of xxx”. The other senior (but not C-level) titles I see used are “Executive/Senior Vice President” or EVP/SVP (to distinguish themselves from the lowly Vice President, which is one step up from entry level on the trading floor), as others have noted above.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always heard the “clients don’t like to meet with someone lower than a VP” explanation for title inflation.
The opposite is often true at Government Consulting firms. One in particular leaves everybody guessing. “Manager” can indicate anywhere from $100k to $900M in annual budget overseen. (The latter would be called a “Business Unit Manager.” Yes, really, a BUM.)
The reason for this is that Government Contracting Officers get very suspicious of bloated direct charges who should be charged to overhead budgets. They don’t like people assigning non-functional VPs to their contracts, as the hours they are paying for are more expensive and seldom provide much direct benefit to the project. So the titles are down-played to make everyone look like a worker bee.
They also don’t like paying green employees to train on the job. They want established professionals working full-time for their particular project. Likewise, if your employee is not management, then you have to pay them for every hour over 40 per week. If they are management, then you can pay them a set salary and then overload them with work so they give lots of free hours. Since the government pays by the hour no matter who is providing it, everything over 40 hours is pure profit.
So everybody is a manager, except the admins and the C-suite.
0 days. They don’t have regular agents. You can enter the FBI as a Special Agent (after completing the New Agent Trainee period). After you meet the requirements for promotion, you become a Senior Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent, and then some flavor of Special Agent In Charge.