Baillie Gifford

For the Investment Research programme the firm describes the three stages explicitly: a screened online form; a first interview with a senior investor and a member of the People Team; and a final, more in-depth stage with additional meetings with senior investors and team members. The FAQ specifies that all first-round interviews are held on Zoom and last around one hour, and the final stage is run as an in-person assessment day at the Edinburgh office combining interviews, individual exercises and informal meetings with current trainees – with an additional group exercise for the technology programmes. Travel and reasonable food costs for the in-person stage are reimbursed. For candidates outside Scotland, the assessment day is a single fixed-date trip to Edinburgh rather than one of several rounds, so it functions as the final filter before an offer.

Baillie Gifford concentrates its early careers offering on two graduate programmes, two technology internships and modern apprenticeships – all Edinburgh-based, with graduate roles permanent from day one:

• Investment Research Graduate Programme – five years, structured as three one-year rotations across equity teams (Long Term Global Growth, Global Alpha, Global Income, plus geographic and thematic teams) followed by a two-year placement; the IMC and CFA Level 1 are compulsory with fees and study leave covered; starting salary £58,000; September 2027 intake.
• Technology Graduate Programme – approximately two years of rotational placements across Shared Services, with applicants nominating Cloud, Infrastructure & Security, Application Development & Enablement, or Innovation as a preference; starting salary £42,000; the firm has stated this programme will not be opened for 2027 applications.
• Technology Summer Internships – ten-week programmes in Software Engineering & Innovation or Cloud, Infrastructure & Security, open to penultimate-year STEM undergraduates.
• Modern Apprenticeships – Edinburgh-based, kickstart-of-career routes for school-leavers.

The firm runs no investment-research internship: the only published path into the equity research scheme is direct graduate entry. Combined with the Edinburgh-only location, the practical consequence is that a candidate set on UK buy-side equity research has to apply directly to the grad programme, plan to relocate to Edinburgh, and commit to a five-year training arc with mandatory CFA progression baked in.

The split is a hard gate: an international student without UK work rights can target the Edinburgh graduate programmes directly, but the technology summer internship – and therefore the informal internship-to-grad funnel that runs in the technology stream – is closed to them, so they cannot use the internship as a sighter for the graduate route.

Founded in Edinburgh in 1908, it has run the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, now the UK's largest investment trust, since 1909. The investment philosophy is unusually long-horizon for a mainstream asset manager: equity teams research companies on a five-to-ten-year view, and the Investment Research graduate scheme itself runs five years end to end with the IMC and CFA Level 1 built in as compulsory study. For an applicant comparing Baillie Gifford with a London-based asset manager or a sell-side rotational scheme, the practical consequence is geography and time horizon: every early-careers role is Edinburgh-based, there is no investment-research internship pipeline to test the firm before committing, and a five-year research training arc is set against schemes that turn out analysts in two.