Paraplanners usually provide the technical investment knowledge in boutique practices and tend to construct plans from "start to finish", according to Hays banking director Jane McNeill.
While she acknowledged it was difficult to generalise across all boutiques, McNeill said financial planners tend to be the "sales people" in many boutiques while the paraplanner actually writes the plan.
"The planner has to go out there and find the business, bring the business in, and keep their clients happy," McNeill said.
"Very often you find that paraplanners have very strong technical skills, but probably wouldn't be able to convey the information to their clients because they haven't necessarily got the strong face-to-face and relationship/sale skills," she said.
Paraplanners in boutiques and within dealer groups tend to attract higher salaries than their counterparts in the general banking industry, where plans tend to be more basic and less likely to involve complex investment products, said McNeill.
According to associate director of recruitment firm Profusion Group, Cholena Orr, many paraplanners see their job as a profession in its own right rather than a pathway to financial planning.
"[Some] are definitely climbing that ladder and want to be financial planners, but there are many career paraplanners who are exceptional at what they do and add a lot of value to the industry," Orr said.
McNeill added it was not necessarily the case that paraplanners were younger than financial planners.
"I've met many very strong paraplanners who have got 20-25 years in the industry," she said.
Orr pointed out that there was scope for paraplanners to move into senior compliance and paraplanning management roles where they could command salaries of $130,000 to $170,000.
However, there continues to be a shortage of paraplanners, simply because it is an "industry that doesn't have a lot of people going into it", according to McNeill.
"It is difficult for them because not many organisations offer training roles. Clearly they do get into them, and often they'll get into a paraplanning role by being in a more junior support type of role and stepping up," she said.
