What makes for a great career? For school leavers and fresh graduates, it can be hard to know. In the popular imagination, financial services equals rows of men in suits processing piles of paper.
That notion hasn’t been correct for many years, but it persists because the world of work can be slightly mysterious.
The young want employment that is personally satisfying, that makes an impact and provides a decent living, but the only thing they hear about that might tick all those boxes is, generally, being a doctor, or a lawyer.
That is why some fascinating careers, such as being a financial adviser, are barely on the radar of most young people. The importance of changing that is one of the reasons why the London Institute of Banking & Finance is part of the steering group of the New Talent Alliance, and is the secretariat for the group.
The NTA is a cross-industry working group within the Consumer Duty Alliance that exists to help and encourage younger people to become financial advisers and to help firms attract new talent.
If your immediate reaction to that is, ‘Uh-huh, don’t you offer qualifications in financial advice, isn’t this purely self-interested?’, bear with me.
I worked as a financial adviser for part of my career, which began in the 1990s. Financial advisers can make a very good living, but I’ve never met one who was in it just for money. They do it because they really value, and enjoy, helping people.
The satisfaction of seeing somebody overcome a significant financial challenge, or achieve some significant financial goal is tremendous.
Here's an example: a woman came to me for advice when she was buying a house. She didn’t have a family, so the only person she needed to worry about protecting was herself.
As she was quite young, critical illness cover was relatively affordable and she took it out. A year later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The cover she had in place simply lifted away all the financial pressure she would otherwise have had to face.
No one ever wants someone to have to use a policy like that, but the knowledge that she was financially secure, when she might otherwise have been vulnerable, has stayed with me.
That is the sort of satisfaction that financial advisers work for. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a financial adviser because I know I made a difference to my clients.
From the outside, financial advice looks like it might be heavy on the arcane details of financial products, on doing admin and on checking through sub-clauses – a little bit dull, in other words.
Providing financial advice is a regulated activity, so, yes, it does have to be done right. Mistakes, which can be costly, are to be avoided. But it’s also tremendously varied, with lots of different specialities, and it exists to help people get the best financial outcome they can.
