To qualify to start the process of becoming a CFA charter holder, you need to either be an undergraduate student, have a bachelor’s degree, or have the appropriate work experience. To qualify via work experience, you must have a combination of 4,000 hours of working or higher education that was accumulated over a minimum of three consecutive years. With this, you can qualify to register for the Level I CFA exam. Even though both education hours and work experience can be used to qualify, the two cannot intersect. In other words, you can’t work 1,000 hours while going to school for 500 hours and add both for a total of 1,500 hours. You would have to choose one or the other. You also need to have skills such as teamwork, leadership, business communications, time management, professional judgment, critical thinking, and problem-solving.