When I'm talking to people about a career in financial advice, I'm often asked what it takes to work in the profession. What are skills financial advisers need?
At St. James’s’ Place Academy, we can support you so you can gain the technical knowledge skills needed to qualify and start to give investment advice to your own clients. There are also some transferrable and inherent skills which will set you up well for a career change to financial advice.
It's not all about your knowledge of financial products, you specialised professional qualifications or your ability to produce detailed financial reports. It's the intangible skills that are going to make you truly successful as an independent financial adviser.
If you are new to the financial advice market. Ask yourself: do you enjoy building relationships and talking to people? Are you entrepreneurially minded? Are you able to empathise with people and support them in important decision making? Do you want a more rewarding career where you are helping others?
The most important attributes, whether you are from a financial services background or new to working in advice, can be summed up in a simple acronym – PRIDE.
Personal Impact
This is your presence, your confidence, your ability to engage and advise others. This doesn’t mean you have to be vastly experienced; you may just be starting out in the working world but have personal impact in abundance.
Perhaps, you are already giving others advice in another setting – in your family and with friends, leading a team sport, taking a leading role in a community or interest group. If you are naturally someone who people are drawn to for advice, the chances are you’ve got great personal impact.
This isn't going to make you better at devising investment strategies or improve your aptitude to research financial products but what it will do is enable you to build and maintain a customer base, as forging a positive client relationship is the first step to becoming a successful financial adviser. You need to develop and perfect your communication style, as it will be essential for locking down potential clients.
Resilience
Are you a resilient person? Can you to recover from set-backs, bounce back stronger, take a challenge head on? Resilience is hard to quantify, but you can draw on real life examples to demonstrate this. It might be a quality you have shown in the workplace, or in your personal life.
Resilience is very much a key skill - at the end of the day, you are running your own business and you need to be able to ride the ups and downs that come with that. Your professional standing is dependent on you, so you need that inner toughness to succeed.
And as your own boss, there are different pressures to that of being an employee. It's not about meeting performance and sales targets or your ability to sell products, it's about showing leadership in the face of challenges.
Integrity
In my mind, this is the most important attribute of a financial adviser. You need to be credible, to show that you are someone people can trust.
Often in your role as a financial adviser you will be supporting people who are vulnerable, people who need to make important life decisions for themselves and their families. You need to be the person they feel they can turn to, a trusted adviser, every time, without question.
You will be offering advice to your clients on their financial planning, it's not something to be taken lightly. Your knowledge will be relied up for the investments they ultimately make and that has a big impact on both their current situation and their future outlook.
It's not just money to people, it's their well being and livelihood, so approaching with integrity, patience and understanding and all skills that financial advisors need.
Drive
The journey to becoming a financial adviser and for some, setting up a financial advice business, requires considerable personal drive. You need to be committed to qualifying and show resilience in abundance.
We find that the most driven individuals are those who are connected to their ‘why’. They understand what their purpose is - their ambition for a new career, whether this is for a new work-life balance, a growing salary or a desire for autonomy, financial independence.
Think about how you have shown this in previous roles, in your studies or consider personal ambitions which you have committed to, strived to achieve and successfully accomplished. Financial advisers with SJP need to be driven, as securing prospective clients, business development and professional growth is all lead by the individual.
Empathy and Emotional Intelligence.
Those who don’t work in financial advice so often fail to recognise the value of personal relationships and empathy in the process.
It's not all about your technical skills or analytical thinking, it's about perfecting your verbal communication and emotional intelligence. You are providing advice to a people with a range of personalities and how you deal with people needs to match that.
As an adviser you will be supporting people to fulfil their ambitions through financial planning; to provide security for a growing family, a new home or a business venture and passing on their legacy, in a tax efficient way, to the next generation.
Equally, you could be helping clients in a time of need, with health concerns, when they are bereaved or experiencing relationship breakdown, for example. Empathy for their experience is so important.
Your advice will need to be given in context, in language which resonates, and which is understood. If you can show that you understand and recognise your client’s challenges, in all their forms, you will build a lasting relationship and become a trusted adviser.