How to bring more young people into advice

With attracting new talent set to be one of the biggest industry challenges of the next few years, making a career in advice more appealing to young people is likely part of the solution.

In a recent episode of the ifa show, Verse Wealth founder Corey Wastle put forward a number of ways in which advisers and practices can begin to engage younger Australians.

“You could pick up the phone, or you can jump on email and get in touch with universities. We’ve all got them all around us and we’ve all typically come from a university, so that’s probably a good place to [go], where your alumni are,” he said.

Mr Wastle also highlighted schools as another opportunity, noting that many advisers have school-aged kids themselves and connections to other schools via their family and friends.

“It comes back to intent, right? We can very easily be out there and going and speaking to 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds about the magic that is financial planning,” he said.

“Speaking to students in university, some of those will kind of divert what their majors are, perhaps, post hearing you speak,” Mr Wastle added.

While acknowledging that the idea sounds simple, Mr Wastle argued that taking such action could pay dividends for the advice industry in the future.

“For every single student in year 11 and year 12 around Australia, if in each of those years, they had a great financial planner come and speak to them for 60, 90 minutes, about money and about the role of a financial adviser in someone’s life and that just happened routinely, I think that alone would shift the trajectory of the amount of people thinking about wanting to get into advice, and some of that’s low-hanging fruit,” he said.

On why young people should consider a career in advice, Mr Wastle said that he finds it incredibly rewarding to be able to build great relationships with people.

“The quality of everyone’s life is in a lot of ways defined by the quality of the relationships they have with people around them, and I think you get to make a big difference to people,” he explained.

“You get to have this really great blend between technical stuff and building knowledge and investment markets and superannuation and all these types of things, but the other side of that is behavioural finance and psychology, and talking about people’s travel plans and getting rid of the guilt they carry with spending money.

“Seeing husband and wife come together on the financial journey, seeing someone go from being in a stressed-out job working 50 hours a week to knowing that they can bring that down to four days a week and change employer and earn a bit less but still be on track for everything else they want to do and then make that big shift in their life with confidence,” he continued.

“To me, that stuff’s awesome. There’s so many fist bump moments and I think a lot of people would feel the same way in the same shoes.”

To hear more from Mr Wastle click here.

Jon Bragg

Jon Bragg is a journalist for Momentum Media's Investor Daily, nestegg and ifa. He enjoys writing about a wide variety of financial topics and issues and exploring the many implications they have on all aspects of life.