Careers in Financial Planning | Alisdair Barr, Striver | #Episode 179

Think about, uh, this podcast.

So this podcast originally, um, we weren't quite sure what, who the target audience would be and, you know, we had a sense of what people want to hear.

Interestingly, and this probably came from our, our marketing team, the sort of suggestion that some of our target audience is in fact exactly your targe- target audience.

They are graduates, people looking to enter sort of the financial services industry, and i- it's a good opportunity for those to actually have a bit of a peek under the hood of businesses they might like to maybe explore working for or looking for employment opportunities.

So I think if you're, uh, the... out there listening today, uh, this one, this one's probably for you.

Amy, do you maybe wanna just touch on, um, I mean, some of the challenges that we've sort of explored in terms of recruitment and, and sort of Alistair touched on in terms of the, the lack of, um, I suppose talent or the lack of, uh, numbers of advisors? But maybe from our perspective, what, what are you seeing in terms of the difficulty with recruitment and why maybe Striver we've kind of had some success with that and why we are now leaning on that as a, as a, as a tool?

Yeah.

I think the difficulty and the challenge that we've faced in the past is that people don't really know what financial planning is.

It's not really touched on, and certainly wasn't when I was going through school, in high school, in primary school and even at uni.

Some of the students we've had come through in our open days or, you know, uh, contacting the office to, to talk to some of the team members, they're not s- sure still what we actually do day-to-day and what it involves.

So that's something we've tried to piece together with a few open days, with, uh, connecting with Deakin and with Striver.

But I haven't found a silver bullet in that challenge of recruitment still.

Um, the only positive that I've really, really seen is connecting in early as people come through that pathway of high school and university.

And, uh, we did have a couple of uni students, uh, in the practice earlier, earlier this year and late last year and, um, I took my hat off to them because they actually just reached out to us off their own bat and said, "I've heard about financial planning, but I don't really know what it is through my high school, and I'd love to, to learn about what it, what it actually means and how you help people." So, um, it's definitely a challenge.

I'm probably more interes-

There's a lot there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm really interested in, in how you've seen it, Alistair, because that's a long time to be working, working in your role and there's a lot that's happened in that time, and I've been here 15 years.

So we've had the Royal Commission.

We've had all sorts of challenges with COVID.

I mean, you would've seen ups, downs, sideways through your time.

Yeah.