Having more adviser academies offering long term employed roles would be a ‘game changer’ for getting new talent into the industry, according to Rob Atherton, chartered financial planner.
Speaking to FT Adviser, Atherton discussed the ways more young advisers could be brought into the profession but emphasised “there was no exact science” to recruiting new talent.
Atherton often posts polls on LinkedIn to gauge what his network thinks when it comes to addressing the advice gap and encouraging younger talent to choose the profession.
In one of the polls, Atherton asked, 'how do we help 50,000 to 100,000 people successfully train and flourish as financial advisers?'
Some 66 per cent of respondents said there was a need for long term employed roles.
Atherton said: “I have had young people reach out to me asking where to find academies that offer employed roles and I have tried to help them but I only know one academy that does it.
"Most other academies entail the adviser to be self-employed and build their own business.
“But if I’m a young person who has just come out of university with debt, life is pretty tough and they don’t want to be self-employed. So a game changer would be more companies creating mass market employed adviser academies.”
Atherton said he has heard instances of people self-studying toward their diploma but then giving up because of the lack of employed roles on offer.
He said: “I do try to help people and tell them to put highly bespoke applications together to local firms and eventually some do find a role, but it is incredibly hard work.
"And it is different to other professions like law and accountancy where you see roles advertised in small, medium and large companies across the country, all the time.”
Atherton felt there needed to be a lot of work done at academy level to be more hands on and supportive with trainees.
He said: “An academy is probably going to put out a glossy brochure and tell everybody it's fun to be an adviser. Yet when people are in the academies, their heads go down, they lose confidence.
“There needs to be a more hands on and nurturing approach rather than just being volume based. But again these are self employed academies so the people on them are going to be sweating, trying to work out where the income is coming from.”
He believed a longer term approach was needed by academies adding “it takes one to two years to launch an adviser, not three to six months.”
Atherton also thought the first out of the big advice firms to offer employed trainee adviser roles will be “inundated”.
“What this will allow the large firms to do is to take on people who simply will not come into our profession, because they don't want the risk of being self employed or setting up their own business.
