Australia’s largest financial planning group has set up a program to convince more university students to choose financial planning as a career.
AMP is offering cash prizes and the opportunity to be involved in upcoming industry conferences as a lure to students. The AMP University Challenge aims to encourage university students to take a closer look at financial planning and to “experience first-hand what it’s like to be a financial planner”.
Students in teams of up to three members will do this by preparing a short, scaled advice discussion paper on the issues faced by two hypothetical clients, and potential solutions to those issues. The paper will be based on a template. The winning team will be chosen after selected finalists present their “recommendations” in a live client role-play.
The competition opened on July 25, with submissions due by September 9, and finalists notified on September 30. Winners will be announced on October 19, and subsequently invited to attend the Financial Planning Association of Australia national conference in November, and the AMP national financial planning conference in January.
AMP hopes the structure of the challenge and the prizes on offer will be enough to attract students who might not otherwise have considered financial planning as a career.
The issue of how to source a greater number of industry entrants from the tertiary sector has long challenged the industry. Currently 16 of Australia’s 38 universities offer approved financial planning-related courses, but the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA) says fewer than 300 university graduates enter the industry each year.
In part, this is due to the fact that financial planning is not yet regarded as the equal of professions such as accounting, medicine or law. Establishing a link between tertiary education and industry is regarded as a critical step in helping to define a professional pathway for students, and the University Challenge is seen as a step in doing this.
Tim Steele, director of AMP’s Horizons Academy, says education is “one of the pillars of a true profession, and it’s only appropriate that we have more university graduates who are thinking about financial planning as a long-term career choice”.
“Part of that is building awareness,” Steele says.
“As a profession we face some similar challenges at the student level as we do at the client level, and that is, having a very good understanding of what financial planning is, and the benefits of financial planning.”
Steele says the University Challenge was structured in association with the FPA and the Financial Planning Academic Forum, a group of more than a dozen academics drawn from a range of universities.
“We support the position the FPA is taking with regard to education standards and professionalism,” Steele says.
“We believe that over time you’re going to require a university degree in order to become a financial planner – which we think is a good thing – and it made sense that AMP do its part to help raise the prominence of a financial planning starting point, and the challenge was one way of us being able to do that.”
The FPA’s head of professionalism, Deen Sanders, says the challenge supports the association’s own push to raise education standards.
“It’s a central tenet of professions that there is a professional body of knowledge; that there is a universal expectation of learning,” Sanders says.
“There’s also, to be fair, in traditional professional approaches [an expectation] that that education should be at university level. The FPA has been driving that agenda for a very long time, and our [Certified Financial Planner] CFP program has always been at a postgraduate level of education.”
Sanders says financial planning is a complex, multi-disciplinary field, and the FPA has been “eager to encourage universities to broaden their appetite and their interest in financial planning”.
“And in fact, we believe in it so much that we’ve put our entire professional structure on the line, and said that from 2013 all new members of the FPA will have an approved degree. It’s foundational, it’s simple: every new member must have a degree, by 2013.
“And this is not just about raising the benchmark – though raising the bar is an important part of the conversation. It’s also about addressing what we see as a crisis, in the issue of Australians getting access to advice and being engaged by the right and qualified professional advisers.
“It’s part of expanding that pool substantially to pick up lots of qualified financial planners, professional financial planners, giving advice to all people in Australia.”
Associate professor Mark Brimble, from Griffith University’s Business School, says it is very important that students understand what their studies eventually lead on to, in terms of the structure and the composition of the industry or profession they may end up working in.
Programs such as the University Challenge bridge the gap between the idea – or what they might have thought they were getting into – and the reality.
