It is becoming increasingly standard practice for those wanting to get into the financial planning industry to begin their career as a paraplanner.
Companies recruiting paraplanners expect candidates to be degree-qualified and prepared to begin study for their Diploma of Financial Planning (DFP), a crucial qualification for anyone wanting to get into the financial planning industry.
However, there is a limited amount to learn as a paraplanner. As a consequence, the job has a fairly limited life span, with most people spending about two years working as a paraplanner.
There is also a limit to how high salaries can go for paraplanners, with a junior paraplanner with no experience starting on about $35,000. With six months experience, they will earn between $40,000 to $45,000 and with a year to 18 months experience can earn between $50,000 and $65,000.
After gaining this experience, paraplanners often then move into either a junior financial planning role or a technical analyst role, where the salary ranges from $50,000 to $75,000, dependent on experience. Technical analysts with at least five years experience with an area of specialisation can earn between $90,000 to $120,000.
Good financial planners with an established client base and excellent business development skills can earn well in excess of $100,000.
The expectations on a financial planner can vary dependent on the organisation. Working within a bank, financial planners are expected to be extremely sales-focused and target-driven.
Working within one of the smaller boutique-type organisations, the focus tends to be more about client relationship management.
Both banks and the smaller boutique-type organisation are using stringent testing to ensure they choose the right candidate for the job. This can often involve psychometric testing but, in addition, highly detailed competency tests are becomingly increasingly common.
A trend we are noticing is that financial planners near the beginning of their careers don’t want to be pigeonholed into specialising in a particular area.
Working for a bank, financial planners might find themselves specialising in tax or superannuation, for example, and want to broaden their horizons, so therefore look at moving to a smaller, boutique-type operation where this is more likely to be possible.
Suburban-based financial planning organisations tend to specialise on the retirement market. As a result, financial planning candidates working for these organisations are seeking CBD-based positions in order to broaden their experience and branch out into the areas of wealth management or wealth creation.
The opposite is also true. Some CBD-based financial planners reaching the end of their careers seek positions working for a suburban organisation for a better work/life balance and because the retiree market may be of particular interest to them at this stage of their career.
Marina Dzaja is a senior consultant in recruitment consultancy Robert Walters.
