Financial Restructuring Summer

This is a summer internship (usually around eight to ten weeks, typically between the penultimate and final year of a degree) in a financial restructuring team — the bankers and advisers who work with companies in serious financial difficulty, and with the lenders and bondholders owed money by them. As an intern you sit with a deal team building financial models, researching distressed companies and their debt, and preparing pitch and analysis documents, while effectively being assessed for a graduate offer. The work sits mostly within investment banks, independent advisory firms and the restructuring arms of large accountancy and consulting firms.

Starting salary: £55k–£70k
Live graduate jobs: 1 open now
Main way in: The standard route is an online application in the autumn of…
They usually ask for: A strong academic record

Approximate graduate salary

Summer internships are paid, usually pro-rated from the graduate salary. For investment banks and independent restructuring advisory firms, graduate analyst pay typically starts somewhere around £55,000–£70,000 base in London, with bonuses on top; restructuring teams within the large accountancy and consulting firms typically start considerably lower, often in the region of £28,000–£38,000 depending on location. These are broad approximations only and vary a great deal by firm, year and city.

What you'd actually do

Building and updating Excel models of a struggling company's cash flows — in particular 13-week cash flow forecasts, which show week by week whether a business will run out of money, and debt waterfall models showing who gets paid what if the company is sold or wound up
Researching a company's capital structure: digging through bond prospectuses, loan agreements and annual reports to work out who lent the money, on what terms, and which creditors rank ahead of others
Putting together pitch books and presentation materials in PowerPoint — company overviews, comparable situations, restructuring options — usually to a very exacting formatting standard
Comparable company and precedent transaction analysis: finding businesses or past restructurings similar to the one in hand to help value a company or judge what recovery creditors might expect

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Sitting in on (and taking notes in) calls with lenders, lawyers, the company's management or the wider deal team, then turning those notes into follow-up actions
Monitoring news and market data on distressed names — which companies are missing payments, breaching covenants (the financial conditions attached to loans) or heading towards administration
Attending training sessions, speaker events and networking lunches laid on by the firm, and preparing for an end-of-internship review or final presentation

How graduates get in

The standard route is an online application in the autumn of your penultimate year for the following summer. Many firms open applications very early and assess on a rolling basis, so applying late in the window is a real disadvantage.
A spring week (a short insight programme in first year, or second year of a four-year course) is a very common feeder — strong spring week participants are often fast-tracked to summer internship interviews. This matters more for restructuring than for many sectors because the teams are small.
Off-cycle internships of three to six months are relatively common in restructuring and distressed-debt advisory, particularly at independent and boutique advisory firms, and can substitute for a summer programme. These are often taken in a placement year or after graduating.
Insight days and 'restructuring academies' run by some firms for first years and under-represented groups, which act as a route into the main process.

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Within the large accountancy firms, restructuring and insolvency summer schemes exist alongside audit and consulting schemes — the entry route there is the firm-wide graduate/internship process rather than a banking-style one, and the work skews more towards insolvency and operational turnaround.
Direct speculative approaches to small restructuring boutiques are unusual but do occasionally work, especially if you already have modelling experience.

What employers ask for

A strong academic record: most firms look for a 2:1 or above, and many still screen on A-levels or UCAS points. Some boutiques are explicitly first-class-oriented, others care much less once you're in interviews.
Degree subject genuinely does not have to be finance. Economics, finance, maths, engineering, history, law and languages are all common. What matters is that you can demonstrate the technical knowledge yourself — non-finance students are expected to have self-taught the accounting and valuation basics.
Solid grasp of the three financial statements and how they link, plus basic valuation (discounted cash flow, trading comparables). Restructuring interviews also test things most generalist interviews don't: debt seniority, enterprise versus equity value in a distressed context, and what happens to different creditors in an insolvency.
Evidence of genuine interest in distressed situations — being able to talk intelligently about a recent restructuring, administration or debt-for-equity swap in the news is close to essential, and is a common failure point for otherwise strong candidates.

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Right to work in the UK, or an understanding of the firm's visa position. Practice varies a lot: some banks sponsor graduate visas readily, some smaller advisory firms do not sponsor at all.
No professional qualification is required at internship stage. If you later join an accountancy firm's restructuring practice you will usually study for ACA or ACCA, and possibly the insolvency exams (JIEB/CPI) afterwards.

Skills that matter

Excel modelling without relying on the mouse

Almost everything you produce — cash flow forecasts, recovery analyses, sensitivity cases — is built in Excel, often under time pressure, and speed and accuracy are noticed immediately.

Reading legal and financial documents closely

Restructuring outcomes turn on the small print of loan agreements and bond documents, so a lot of the junior work is extracting terms correctly from long, dense contracts.

Understanding debt structures and creditor priority

The core question in nearly every deal is who gets paid first and how much is left for everyone else, and you can't contribute usefully without that framework.

Accuracy and self-checking

A single wrong cell in a recovery model can change the advice given to a creditor committee, so juniors are judged heavily on whether their work needs rechecking.

Handling ambiguity and incomplete information

Distressed companies often have poor data and unreliable management forecasts, so you are routinely asked to make reasonable assumptions and state them clearly rather than wait for perfect numbers.

Stamina and composure under unpredictable hours

Restructuring deals run to court dates, payment deadlines and covenant tests rather than office hours, and work can arrive late in the evening with a next-morning deadline.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Complete the summer internship and, if you perform well, receive an offer to return as a graduate analyst after final year. Conversion rates vary a lot by firm and by year — treat the offer as earned rather than expected.
Analyst (typically around three years at investment banks and advisory firms, though some run two-year or four-year analyst programmes). You own models, manage data rooms and draft the bulk of client materials.
Associate, then vice president — progressively more client contact, running the day-to-day of a deal and supervising analysts. Within accountancy-firm restructuring practices the equivalent ladder is executive, assistant manager, manager, often alongside ACA and then insolvency qualifications.
Many people exit after the analyst years rather than continuing. Common destinations are distressed debt and special situations funds, private credit, private equity, in-house corporate development or a turnaround/CFO-track role at a company. Restructuring is regarded as unusually good preparation for credit investing because you already think about downside and recovery.
Longer term: director, managing director or partner, where the job becomes winning mandates and managing relationships with lenders, sponsors and company boards. Timelines here vary very widely and depend heavily on firm size and market conditions.

What people get wrong

“Restructuring is for people who weren't good enough for M&A, and it's quieter work.”

It is often one of the more technically demanding areas and is highly competitive at the specialist advisory firms. It is also countercyclical — when the economy weakens and M&A dries up, restructuring teams get busier, which is partly why people value the experience.

“You spend the summer advising struggling companies on how to turn themselves around.”

Advisory firms are just as often hired by the creditors — banks, bondholders, distressed funds — who are negotiating against the company. Which side a team sits on shapes the whole job, and some firms deliberately specialise in one side.

“It's essentially insolvency and liquidation work, so it's mostly legal and administrative.”

Most restructuring work aims to avoid formal insolvency, through refinancings, amend-and-extend deals, debt-for-equity swaps or sales. Formal processes like administration are one possible outcome, not the default, and the analysis is financial rather than legal — though you work alongside lawyers constantly.

“The internship is mainly about proving you can model; get the technicals right and the offer follows.”

Teams are small and you are being assessed on whether people want to sit next to you for three years. Reliability, asking sensible questions, and not disappearing when work is being handed out count for as much as technical polish — and in small teams, one bad impression is hard to undo.

Where this varies

The label covers two quite different worlds. At investment banks and independent restructuring advisory houses, the work is deal-driven, heavily modelling-based, concentrated in London, hours are long and pay is high. At the big accountancy and consulting firms, 'restructuring' covers a wider range including operational turnaround, contingency planning, cash management and formal insolvency appointments; it is spread across regional UK offices as well as London, involves more on-site work with mid-sized businesses, pays less to start and usually comes with a funded professional qualification. There is also variation in whose side you act for — debtor-side versus creditor-side mandates feel different day to day. Finally, activity in this field is strongly affected by the economic cycle, so hiring volumes in any given year can swing noticeably.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.