The annual survey of respected professions came out last week and unsurprisingly nurses again topped the list of the individuals the public trusts the most. It’s the twenty-second year in a row – twenty-second! – that nurses have ranked number one.
The survey, by Roy Morgan Research, always makes entertaining reading and even without reading down the full list of occupations, you know that financial planners are down at the bottom, again, as are journalists (more on that later).
The Roy Morgan research illustrates a multitude of issues but the most fundamental one is an issue that emerged once more this week in the ongoing debate about professional, education and ethical standards in financial planning. The research purports to survey opinions about professions, but most of the occupations listed in the survey are not professions at all – including, let’s not forget, financial planning.
Within financial planning there still seems to be some uncertainty about what a profession is, and what being a professional means. It’s puzzling after all this time that it’s not clearer to more people.
It came to the surface when the managing director and chief executive officer of Mentor Education, Dr Mark Sinclair, wrote on the Professional Planner website about the mooted standards body for the financial planning profession.
The response to Sinclair’s piece was apparent outrage and insult at the suggestion that financial planners are not professionals. Well perhaps it’s still news to some, but financial planning is not a profession. Never has been, still isn’t.
The public knows that – and that’s why, in the Roy Morgan research, only 27 per cent of people surveyed rated planners “high” or “very high” on ethics and honesty. (It was 19 per cent for newspaper journalists; no specific mention was made of online/magazine journalists…).
A professional association holds the power of life. And death.
Shall we explain again why? A profession isn’t created by a bunch of people who dress well, have nice offices and are well presented, who care about clients and put those clients’ interests first. Those things are part of being a profession, but on their own they are not enough. They are the really easy and extremely superficial parts of it. Being a professional and belonging to a profession takes much, much more than that, and that is what many still fail to grasp.
For a start, a professional must be a member of a professional association. A professional association should hold the power of life and death over one’s career. Get punted from the association and you should lose your right to practice. That’s how you give professional standards and codes of ethics real teeth and real bite: make a break actually matter. You might not get automatically expelled for a breach, but expulsion should be the association’s ultimate sanction against the individual who can’t or will not measure up.
There is no entity in the financial planning space that has this standing. That’s possibly the first, and the most fundamental thing, that financial planning needs. Then it needs tough codes of ethics and professional standards, and to impose high education standards (entry and ongoing), and have the courage to enforce them. Courage comes from each and every member of a profession giving his and her support to the professionals’ association to carry out these tasks. Otherwise there is nothing to trust, no one to respect, and no profession of which to speak – and financial planning practitioners will continue to languish with journalists.
How long stuck in limbo?
In this context it is a genuine tragedy that legislation governing education, professional and ethical standards has been placed into limbo.
And even if it were not in limbo between governments, then the decision by the Turnbull government to push out the deadline to meet the new education standards to 2024 would be bad enough, and has already turned the push for professionalism into a bad joke. It is still not clear at whose insistence the deadline was extended; when the culprit(s) are identified they should be exposed and asked to explain publicly the vested interests behind their lobbying to subvert the development of financial planning as a profession.
The usual reaction to this type of article (keep an eye out for it) is for someone to dismiss it because journalists are not themselves professionals and therefore have no standing to comment on others who may or may not be. The reasons journalists are so low down on the list of respected occupations are simple.
Journalism isn’t a profession. It has an industry body (but no professional association) and a code of ethics, but membership of the association isn’t compulsory and getting booted out of it for breaching the code of ethics – if that is even possible – doesn’t stop anyone from calling themselves a journalist or working as one. There are no minimum education standards to get in, and no ongoing professional development requirements.
So sad, it’s laughable
Journalism fails the test of being a profession on so many issues it’s laughable.
But you know what? So does financial planning. There are industry bodies, but no professional associations. There are various codes of ethics, but membership of an association is not compulsory and getting punted from one of them for breaching its code of ethics – if it has one – doesn’t stop anyone from calling themselves a financial planner, nor from working as one. There are no minimum education standards to get in, and no ongoing professional development requirements. You might not get in to an industry association if you don’t meet a minimum education standard, and you might get booted out if you don’t do your required CPD – but if you’re not a member of one of these associations, well, see above.
Financial planning continues to fail the test of being a profession on pretty much the same issues that journalism does. And that’s no laughing matter at all.
