Increasing numbers of young financial planners are looking for ways to help develop the skills they need to effectively deal with clients, said Sarah Riegelhuth, partner in boutique financial planning firm Wealth Enhancers. She says a formal mentoring program is away to connect “someone who’s newer to the industry with someone who’s got a lot more experience”.
Riegelhuth, who is also the Association of Financial Advisers’ (AFA) national GenXt chair, says it’s never too late to look for a mentor, and a mentoring relationship can last for several years.
“I’m still in touch with all of the mentors I’ve had in the past, and my aspirant,” she says. “I’ve actually been a mentor and an aspirant, and I can say from both sides that you’ll get a lot out of it.”
Riegelhuth says “being a mentor allowed me to improve my own leadership ability and my own leadership skills, and really start to see how I can influence people to make great decisions and help them grow in their careers”.
“It’s also really rewarding to see someone go on a journey, and when you first start that mentoring process you feel like, oh, how am I going to be able to help them, but you see that over time you are able to,” she says.
According to Riegelhuth, mentoring is less about imparting technical know-how and more about the soft skills of what advisers do.
“You’ll spend a lot more time talking about how to deal with clients, and how they can progress in their careers, how can they deal with the other people they are working with – that kind of thing – than the technical side, particularly when we find that a lot of young people have a huge amount of technical knowledge already.”
She says the AFA’s mentoring program has been running for about five years and is designed to match mentors with aspirants.
“It’s a structured program, there’s a workbook, there are guidelines around what you should do and essentially it’s a once-a-month meeting for about an hour,” she says.
“But a lot of it is up to the aspirant and mentor to work out what’s going to work for them, and what time frames.”
