Young shy away from joining advice industry

Who would blame young advisers for not wanting to join our industry. After working hard as a planner for many years and now being subjected to the attacks on our profession by people who mainly do not know anything about financial planning, I would not encourage them to become planners. The risk involved is not worth the trouble, when you can be sued if markets go down.

To any young potential planner reading this article and comments - stick with it.

It's not easy, but if you love working with people you will have no greater opportunity to meet, assist and learn from such a wide range of people.

The special privilege of a financial planner is that we are able to witness so of the many different paths to success that our clients take, and then apply that accumulated wisdom to how we live our own lives.

I have to Agree with Michael, the financial industry is a wonderful career path, if you stay focused and have good mentors around you who are in the business for the right reasons you will enjoy a long and rewarding career .

I currently have three young people in North Queensland studying via Kaplan. My main area of concern is that there are no qualified trainers North of Brisbane, which in turn places a lot of work on the existing planners and directors helping with their assignments and studies.

However long term it will be rewarding for both the new advisor and the business .

Cheers
Dougy

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We fail to see this on a relative basis..... young, driven individuals are looking at their friends in engineering, accounting or legal professions and then looking at planning.

For all the issues of those industries, as far as financial planning is concerned, today they see an industry struggling to become a profession, constantly in the press for the wrong reasons. The general public and other professions do not consider financial planning to be a 'profession' so how can we expect young graduates to think so?

They see an industry still dominated by sales focused banks, they see an industry where its most senior practitioners do not have the same background as them. They are not from the traditional professional background, they hail from the good old days of insurance and manage fund sales, or where simply promoted through the ranks of bank teller or mortgage broker to 'financial planner'. Whether you view that as good or bad is irrelevant, new entrants cannot identify with the current ones.

They also see an industry where years of university and post graduate study are not the norm, a vocational diploma is still 'ok' and grants you the same access and privilege as those whom have committed to a higher level of learning. Yet another cross in the professionalism box.

Now ask yourself..... if you were a smart young individual contemplating what professional path you will take..... would you not blame them for wanting to stick with the more traditional professions?

Is it any wonder, after the wide publicity surrounding the Storm fiasco and other collapses and how certain quarters with political connections used this to denigrate the whole financial planning profession, to further their own ends? To paint advisers as criminals, when the vast majority are hard working, honest people who comply with all the regulations. Our industry's greatest failing is that we don't have the financial clout or cohesion to take on our detractors.

It's impossible to take on a large organisation with government connections and deep pockets, able to fund 24/7 advertising campaigns (even though all profits are supposed to go back to members...yeah sure). If people see something enough they start to believe it. Anecdotes and innuendo are soon regarded as facts. No doubt potential adviser recruits have succumbed to the same bombardment of negative stereotypes and have decided not to join the leper colony.