Model Review Experience: The Benefits

A lot of modellers start out their career with hopes of building huge, industry-shaking models, only to have their dreams dashed early on. Assigned to what they feel are manual tasks, or boring reviews, they sigh at their seniors, who keep telling them how invaluable model review experience is, and how it will make them a better modeller, but they don’t always have time to explain the advantages.

This reaction is understandable, model reviews can often be time-pressured, and the focus is on getting the work done as quickly as possible, rather than development points.

In this blog, our aim is to show model reviews in a more positive light and give future modelling pros some insight into how they can make the most of their review work.

Your models will be reviewed one day too

We need to know what makes a good model, right? What better way than to review as many as you can?

By doing this your model build skills will improve and you’ll learn to avoid build techniques that are difficult to review.

As you progress through your career, the time will come when your models will be reviewed. People who have put in the hours and become long-time reviewers have been known to have their own models pass full-audits with flying colours.

You will see it all

Well, maybe not everything, but reviews are generally shorter in duration than build projects, so you will get lots of exposure to different industries. Even better than that, you will probably see multiple models from the same industry, meaning you’ll accumulate a lot of specialist knowledge.

This will allow you to tap into the creativity of the builders whose work you are reviewing. Every single one of them. That’s a great resource pool. You will see exactly how different people approached the same problem which will allow you to compare, contrast, and see what can work where, and then apply this new knowledge to your own models.

You won’t miss out on build work

You may think by reviewing models all the time, you’ll never actually get to build any, but that’s not true. Ever heard of a parallel build? This is a review technique, whereby the reviewer replicates the workings of the model they are reviewing. They then compare the results to see if the two models agree.

If there is a difference between the models, you’ll get the chance to hone your reconciliation skills and you’ll see where you or the client went wrong and understand the problem all the better for it.

The benefits of boring

A lot of the work in gaining model review experience can be repetitive, but this is a good thing as repetition builds good habits. As modellers, we love to improve processes, and there is nothing better to get your automation going than a laborious task.

Don’t like how long reviews can take? There’s ample opportunity for speeding up the process of reviewing blocks of formulae, and your superiors will only thank you for it.

Summary

We don’t always have a choice of exactly where our career takes us, but we should grasp every chance to learn, and model review is definitely full of such opportunities.

If you’d like to learn more about the different types of model review techniques, take a look at our Financial Model Review course and contact us at info@pps.financial.