How up to date is the PRM curriculum?

[Anonymous]

I’ve been considering taking PRM exams (I currently have CFA designation). What makes me hesitate a bit is that it is difficult to get a good overview of what is in the curriculum – compared e.g. to CFA where you can easily check old eBooks or third party providers to get familiar with the material.

It would be interesting to hear your comments on how up-to-date the material is. Let me give a specific example: EMIR (or Dodd-Frank in the USA) are very topical at the moment in risk management. Google search shows that PRMIA is organizing EMIR seminars. Another example is the EU short selling regulation introduced in 2012. But how do these topics feature in the curriculum?

If I invest couple of hundred hours to take the exam, I would really like to learn state of the art risk policy issues, not just the old Baeringsbank stories or Basel summaries

[Mukul Pareek]

To some extent you will be studying the stories about Barings and stuff like that – academic courses are always quite behind the real world. One reason for that is it takes a lot of work for any association to change its syllabus, create new material, exams; and there is always some process involved in taking board approvals, building consensus etc before they make any changes. Same applies to GARP/FRM, the syllabus is pretty much the same and changes are cosmetic. The fact though is that other than regulation not much new is being invented in risk management every day…VaR is still the same as it was in the mid-nineties, and the concepts of capital adequacy, liquidity, asset-liability matching aren’t new either. You can change risk weights, percentages, make a few changes here and there in the calculations but those are more about the mechanics than any profound conceptual or philosophical changes.

As for seminars, those are easy to organize. In fact if you look at the PRMIA event calendar they are always ahead of the game and in fact next week I will be going to listen in on big data and risk management. But what they have on the exam about data management is from about 3 or 4 years ago when people weren’t talking of big data.

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