Morningstar reviews

The MDP program is a complete waste of time. The first stint is in support answering phone calls the whole day, where I was told I would spend "6-9 months", which during the orientation period just prior to starting suddenly jumped to "12-14 months" if you have not reached the "competency expected". This is a completely arbitrary decision and dependent on your manager. The freedom to decide when to rotate that the company touts is very misguided and borderline dishonest. Rotating requires applying to jobs within the company and going through several rounds of interviews once again. As a result, rotating does not encourage trying new teams/departments if you are going to be asked about prior experience and demonstrated interest. It is certainly not unusual for people to stay in support for 12 months or longer, which is absolutely ridiculous for a 2 year program that supposedly offered 3 rotations. It most certainly does not in that time frame, except for a tiny minority of MDPs. In addition, getting permission to rotate is just the beginning. You have to wait for a position to be publicly posted within the company to apply. Sometimes these are positions available to MDPs, but you can also apply to jobs available to everyone in the company. Naturally, postings are all competitive so it is not unusual to see people getting rejected several times from rotations, which means you are stuck on support in the meantime. The lack of structure is harmful for the program. I would not recommend this program to anyone. The job drains the energy from participants and does not encourage or reward hard work. If you are a motivated college student looking for meaningful work, I recommend looking anywhere else.

Unlike what this role is presented as to internal hires, it involves minimal writing or argumentation. Internals with years of experience are hired into an "associate" role while externals a year out of college are hired a level up. These "associates" publish reports, for upwards of a year, under the names of people who typically had nothing to do with their creation. Copy-and-paste busywork from the broader group gets dumped on these "associates", so someone 1-5 years out of college spends more time pasting bits from one spreadsheet to the next instead of learning about the financial industry or establishing oneself as an analyst. The opportunity to write research pieces on the industry is routinely played up in the job description and hiring process, but this is BS: such opportunities barely exist, and when they do, it's yet again more copy-and-pasting old pieces and replacing some numbers. The group itself is split between people with 5 or fewer years of experience on one side, and people whose main priority isn't professional development on the other. Salary is lackluster. Internal work on reports is very high level and – surprise – is mostly copy and paste. For the prestige that Morningstar seems to think this group carries, the behind-the-scenes is unimpressive. To internals: absolutely do not apply; you'll be nothing but cheap labor with lots of potential career progression time utterly wasted. And to externals: why would you want to work at this kind of company?