Barclay has an undergraduate degree in Business Studies from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, an MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a UK Securities Industry diploma.

Prior to Advent International Bruce Barclay worked in investment banking and Corporate Finance: Hill Samuel Corporate Finance, and KPMG Corporate Finance (specialising in Private Equity transactions), and in industry in computers (NCR Computers, including coding and programming) and in a leading venture capital backed hi tech startup in state of the art robotics, machine vision systems and artificial intelligence, where his work was also published in a range of publications.