M&G

The firm names Aon as the assessment vendor and does not name HireVue. Because the Aon assessment is sat at home in advance of the booked interview, a candidate running several UK financial-services applications needs slack between submission and the human interview for the assessment itself, not only for interview prep.

M&G runs three distinct early-career routes, set out on its graduate opportunities and internships pages:

• Graduate schemes: two to three years, with team rotations and a permanent role on completion; cohorts start every September; open to any degree discipline
• Summer internship: an eight-week immersion for students in their penultimate undergraduate year, which the firm describes as a pipeline into its graduate schemes
• Apprenticeships: for candidates without a degree, across digital, financial, marketing and HR tracks; M&G has been recognised on the Top 100 Apprenticeship Employers list

Graduates can earn professional qualifications during the scheme, including the Investment Management Certificate (IMC) and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). The internship is short and selective - eight weeks inside a single team, used by M&G to convert interns into graduate-scheme offers - so its return is highest for a penultimate-year candidate happy to commit to one team for the summer, and limited for someone already mid-way through a different multi-year graduate route.

M&G's own careers homepage and independent profiles such as Wikipedia describe a firm with a particular shape among UK asset managers:

• £375.9bn in assets under management (firm-stated)
• A combined retail and institutional client base: roughly 4.2 million retail clients alongside more than 1,000 institutional clients
• 34 offices across 27 international markets, with a UK weighting
• Demerged from Prudential plc in October 2019 and listed independently on the London Stock Exchange, putting the savings and asset-management business on its own balance sheet
• Funded support for industry qualifications during the graduate scheme, including the IMC and CFA

The integrated retail-plus-institutional book matters to a candidate choosing between a pure-play asset manager and a bancassurance arm: rotations cover both wholesale-style asset management and retail-savings distribution rather than only one side, and the formal qualifications cost is borne by the firm rather than self-funded.