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September 15, 2010 at 03:25 PM
Like most college undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs across the country in financial planning, Kansas State University (where I got my degree in financial planning and now teach as an adjunct professor) offers a great career class in which students build their own practices. They pick a target market, design a appropriate service offering, write a marketing plan, identify the software they’ll need, decide how and what they’re going to charge, and wrap it all into a 10-year business plan.
As a result, when they graduate, KSU financial planners, like many other graduates around the country, are well-trained and more than ready to go start their own firms.
The problem is that most graduates get very little training in how to be a good employee and how to create successful careers in someone else’s financial planning firm. That’s unfortunate, because in today’s financial planning industry, the vast majority of people, young planners and career changers, begin their careers in an established planning firm.
I can tell you that in my experience working with all types of employees of planning firms over the past 10 years, there’s a whole lot more to learn about being a successful employee and having a successful, fulfilling career making a substantial impact and salary in someone else’s creation.
So when AdvisorOne Editor Jamie Green asked me to write a blog about careers in financial planning, I couldn’t have been happier. It will give me a chance to give all of you the same time-tested advice I’ve been giving my clients’ employees–and my clients themselves–all these years.
