There’s a stage in an adviser’s career that seems to get much less attention than the exams that come before it. You’ve done the studying, passed the exams and you’re working towards being able to advise independently. On paper, there’s a route through qualification and Competent Adviser Status, but in practice the bit where you actually learn how to do the job is much less straightforward.
Knowing the technical answer is one thing. Sitting in front of a client and knowing which questions to ask, when to probe a little further, how to deal with a conversation that goes off in a direction you weren’t expecting, and what information the rest of the advice team will need from you afterwards is something completely different. That part comes with experience, and how much support you get while you build that experience can depend a lot on the firm you join.
Some larger firms have built a lot of structure around that journey. They have academies, mentors, supervised client work and experienced people whose job it is to help new advisers develop. Smaller firms can offer brilliant experience too, and in some ways a new adviser may get more exposure to the whole business, but they don’t always have the same infrastructure sitting behind them. Often, the person doing the mentoring is also running a client bank, managing staff and trying to keep the business moving.
That’s the part I’ve been thinking about lately. When a firm takes on someone who is still developing, those early cases naturally need more time and attention. There are more questions, more checking and more conversations around why something has been done in a particular way. That’s exactly how it should be, but it can put pressure on the people around them, particularly in a smaller business where there may only be one or two experienced advisers available to provide that support.
It made me wonder whether there’s a role for We Complement in the work that sits around development, without stepping on a firm’s own training and competence arrangements or getting anywhere near CAS sign-off.
The fact-find is one obvious example. Our team sees what happens to a case once the client meeting is over. We see which gaps in information lead to more questions later, what makes a file straightforward to research and write, and what tends to result in somebody having to go back to the adviser for more detail. It’s a view of the advice process that newly qualified advisers don’t always get to see, and I think there could be real value in sharing some of that earlier.
That doesn’t need to become another formal training programme or compliance checklist. It could be as simple as showing someone what a strong fact-find looks like from the point of view of the person picking it up afterwards, and explaining why certain details matter. It might work as a short guide, a session with an academy cohort or something more informal for a group of advisers who are still finding their feet.
There’s also the wider capacity issue. If an experienced adviser is spending more time mentoring and reviewing early cases, something else in the business still needs to get done. Paraplanning, research, processing and admin don’t disappear while someone is developing. That’s where I can see a role for flexible support, helping to take some of the pressure elsewhere so the people inside the firm can spend their time where it’s most valuable.
I’ve been looking at how different firms approach this, from larger academies through to newer propositions such as Evergreen, and there clearly isn’t one model that works for everybody. I also came across a Money Marketing piece on Competent Adviser Status which makes the point that qualification is only one part of the journey. The practical experience that follows matters just as much, which feels obvious when you work in advice, but perhaps less obvious from the outside looking in.
What I keep coming back to is the smaller firm that wants to develop its own next adviser but doesn’t have an academy sitting behind them. We don’t have a finished answer to that, and I don’t really want to invent one from our side of the desk. I’d much rather understand what firms and advisers actually find difficult during that stage and see whether there’s something useful we can build around it.
So if you run an academy, mentor advisers working towards CAS, or you’re a smaller firm developing someone new, I’d really like to hear what that experience looks like for you. And if you’ve been through it yourself in the last few years, what’s the one thing you wish somebody had shown you earlier?
