Advancing Your Career as a Finance Analyst: What Manish Madan’s Path to EY Looks Like

Mr. Manish Madan is a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young (EY), one of the Big Four professional services firms, and the subject of this Skill Talk episode (YouTube ID: bVm3o8umqoo, embedded above). His career offers a useful, concrete answer to a question many aspiring finance analysts ask: what does “advancing” as a finance analyst actually look like in practice, a few years down the line?

Manish holds the CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) qualification, and his work sits at an interesting intersection: applying financial and analytical rigor to the entertainment and media business. That’s a less conventional pairing than, say, finance-for-banking or finance-for-manufacturing, and it’s part of what makes his profile worth a closer look. Management accounting qualifications are built around using financial data to support business decisions rather than just reporting numbers after the fact — exactly the skill set needed when a media business wants to know, in advance, whether a show or a platform investment is likely to perform.

The distinguishing feature of Manish’s work is applying predictive modelling to entertainment and media clients — the kind of analysis that tries to estimate viewership, engagement, or business performance for entertainment properties before or during their run. It’s a good illustration of where finance analysis is heading more broadly: the technical skill of building and interpreting a model is transferable across industries, but the domain expertise of understanding what drives outcomes in media and entertainment specifically is what turns a generic analyst into someone a Big 4 firm trusts to advise high-profile clients in that sector.

Worth flagging for readers researching qualifications while reading this: CIMA is a genuine, respected credential, and it’s simply an honest fact about Manish’s own background — not a suggestion that it’s the only route into this kind of work. If you’re mapping out your own path into financial analysis today, IMS Proschool’s current programs — CFA, ACCA, US CPA, US CMA, Financial Modeling, and CFP — cover overlapping ground in management accounting, financial analysis, and modelling, and are worth comparing against your own career goals.

You don’t need to work in media to learn something from this episode. The broader lesson is that “advancing” as a finance analyst rarely means doing more of the same task faster — it usually means adding a specialism, whether an industry, a technique, or both, on top of a strong analytical and accounting foundation. Manish’s combination of a management accounting credential with hands-on predictive modelling experience, applied to a specific industry most analysts never touch, is one concrete way that combination can play out. Watch the embedded episode above to hear him describe that path in his own words.

Whatever industry you eventually specialize in, the foundation Manish’s story points to — a solid accounting or management-accounting qualification, plus hands-on analytical and modelling skills — is the same foundation IMS Proschool’s current courses are designed to build. Our Financial Modeling program is built specifically around the kind of hands-on modelling skills used in predictive and valuation work, while ACCA, US CPA, and US CMA build the accounting and management-accounting depth needed to be trusted with high-stakes client work, and CFA and CFP round out the investment and planning side of a finance career. Advancing from analyst to senior manager, in any industry, tends to come down to the same combination this episode highlights: credentials, applied skill, and enough specialism to become the person a big client trusts with hard questions.