abrdn

The School Leaver Traineeship has no minimum education requirement, is structured as a "learn as you earn" route with an assigned line manager, buddy, and tutor plus access to an online education platform, and is reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis. The firm's registered office is 1 George Street, Edinburgh. Because the three routes are keyed to stage of education rather than line of business, the entry point a candidate applies through is fixed by qualification stage, with the team allocation set once inside the programme.

Each stage is a separate gate, and the final stage is in person rather than virtual. Because the firm's hiring is Edinburgh-anchored and the assessment centre is face-to-face, a candidate who reaches the final round will typically travel to Edinburgh for it, a single-day commitment that is hard to align with a same-week London assessment elsewhere in the asset-management or banking cycle.

Two specific things distinguish it from the bulk of UK asset-management peers:

• Hiring is anchored to Edinburgh rather than London, with the registered office at 1 George Street, so the early-career base of operations is Scottish.
• The firm runs a non-graduate School Leaver Traineeship and a Young Person's Guarantee for 16- to 24-year-olds in Scotland alongside its summer-internship and graduate streams, giving it a wider entry funnel than peers that recruit only graduates.

A candidate weighing abrdn against London-anchored asset managers is therefore choosing both a different city and a different recruiting model, where the firm targets school-leavers and 16- to 24-year-olds as deliberately as it targets penultimate-year undergraduates.