As Zoom meetings and digital collaboration tools become the norm in finance, veteran financial professional Levi Pettit is swimming against the remote-work tide. Pettit’s perspective might surprise the digital-native generation: Your career may depend on showing up in person.
“Young people who want to pursue finance may find remote work attractive,” says Pettit, a chartered financial analyst charterholder whose career spans commercial banking and investment management. “However, for an entry-level position, you really should be looking for opportunities where you can be face-to-face with people every single day.”
The Invisible Education
The pandemic normalized remote work across industries, but Levi Pettit argues that finance professionals lose something crucial when they trade the office for home — mentorship moments that happen in the spaces between formal meetings.
“Sometimes it’s just this knowledge that they impart as you’re walking around and bump into them or they hear something at an office,” Pettit notes, describing the impromptu learning opportunities that vanish in virtual environments.
These chance encounters aren’t just social niceties but can be career-shaping experiences. When a junior analyst observes how a senior manager handles a difficult client call or negotiates deal terms, they’re receiving an education unavailable through formal training programs.
“You want to surround yourself with people you look up to,” Pettit explains. “Being able to just shadow them or be next to them when they’re going through some decision-making process, or just seeing how they carry themselves on a day-to-day basis is extremely important.”
What Levi Pettit Discovered Through Direct Access
Pettit’s conviction stems from his experience at a family office, where the flat organizational structure gave him direct access to decision-makers.
In traditional corporate settings, information and decisions filter through multiple management layers. By contrast, Pettit found that smaller organizations offered invaluable proximity to leadership thinking: “It never felt like I had to talk to a boss, who had to talk to their boss, who had to talk to somebody else’s boss.”
This direct access accelerated his professional development in ways that would have been impossible in a remote setting. Watching his boss deal with complex investment decisions provided a master class in financial judgment that no virtual meeting could replicate.
Finding Mentors in the Remote Work Age
For graduates weighing job offers, Levi Pettit’s advice is clear: Prioritize environments where learning opportunities abound, even if they come with less flexibility.
“I’m not saying that remote work doesn’t work in some industries or roles, it absolutely does. But for me, if I was graduating today, I would try to find something that required me to be in a seat five days a week,” Pettit advises, adding that potential hires should specifically inquire about “team culture” and “on-site mentorship.”
This doesn’t mean rejecting all remote opportunities. Rather, Pettit suggests being strategic about which professional stages benefit most from in-person learning. Entry-level positions set patterns and habits that shape entire careers, making them particularly critical for face-to-face mentorship.
Finding these mentors rarely happens passively. “You have to put yourself out there,” Pettit emphasizes, describing his own career trajectory as deeply influenced by mentors who guided his development.
His message to ambitious finance professionals is both traditional and increasingly countercultural — in an industry built on relationships and nuanced judgment, there remains no substitute for showing up.
As companies continue debating return-to-office policies, Levi Pettit’s perspective offers a reminder that flexibility comes with trade-offs — and for those building careers in finance, the most valuable education might still happen at the desks and in the hallways where decisions are made.