Advisers in Training
For top adviser firms, effectively training new staff is critical to ensuring the practice’s success—but it goes beyond just teaching them the required information.
Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group of Wakefield, Massachusetts, moves retirement plan adviser trainees through a multi-year program combining study, exposure and experience, says Eileen Greenspan senior vice president, retirement plan advisory services. Formal training starts with an approximately two-year general immersion in Sentinel’s business, giving trainees the chance to absorb the firm’s culture while learning how different investment divisions operate.
The specifics of retirement plan advising are taught through a credentialing and mentoring process, Greenspan says. “Before a plan adviser can advise, he must have at least a Series 65 [securities] license. Once obtaining that, he can explore all the products [Sentinel] has to offer,” she says. To learn about plan consulting, trainees are teamed with a mentor. “They tag along with our more senior plan advisers to as many client meetings as possible” and are asked to help prepare presentations to sponsors and participate in employee education meetings, she says.
To ensure mastery of their trade, the firm later requires that they earn an Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF®) designation and encourages additional certification. Learning is further supplemented with webinars about investments, at least quarterly meetings run by the firm’s chief investment officer (CIO) and bi-weekly adviser team meetings where they share their experiences and learn from one another.
Pension Architects of Los Angeles takes a less formal but, nonetheless, still intensive approach to training. In their first year, new advisers learn what methods make the firm successful and unique, says partner Philip Steele. “We want them to understand and appreciate how we view qualified retirement plan design and marketing, so they’ll carry the torch in the same way all of our teammates do.”
Foremost, this means instilling the practice’s core principles—“that people have a better chance of a sustainable and predictable retirement if they’re working with us than perhaps former relationships,” Steele says. Senior practice members make the point by preaching what they believe and why they believe it, he says. “Proof is usually data, metrics and results you can use to say, ‘This is why we put so much energy, and focus our resources, into this part of it instead of that part of it.’”
When given a pile of case studies of clients and new plans to review, trainees are asked to think critically, Steele says. “We want them to study that and start feeling the rhythm of each of these designs and understand the common threads they see regardless of plan size, industry or demographic specifications.”
An important goal of hiring and training is retention, both executives believe. Steele points to the cultural as well as the financial losses that result from turnover. “The more you can hire people who’ll be around for a long time, the more it helps the culture of the firm. And I think the happier the culture, the better the work you do for the client.”