Are PD days in need of a shake up?

Advisers Conaill Keniry and Benjamin Collins, managing directors of a small boutique dealer group, were recently faced with the challenge of finding a fresh and engaging activity for their next professional development (PD) day.

Having realised that traditional PD sessions, filled with slides and presentations, were not the most enjoyable for advisers, the duo decided to create an event that would offer a more interactive and fun experience.

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Mr Keniry and Mr Collins have since launched The Adviser Games, a new way for advisers to maintain and build upon their industry expertise – and have fun while doing it.

In conversation with ifa following the inaugural event hosted in Brisbane earlier this month, Mr Keniry said that PD days were in dire need of a revamp.

“We had this problem of, ‘What are we going to do for our next PD day?’ And in the nicest possible way, sometimes sitting and staring at slides isn’t the most enjoyable thing to do,” he explained.

Fittingly then, The Adviser Games page on LinkedIn has “because PD Days are boring” detailed in its description.

“So we thought, ‘Hey, what can we do to make it a bit more engaging, a bit more fun?’” Mr Keniry continued.

Speaking to other advisers, he found that what they desired most out of their PD days could be better achieved under a reimagined format.

“The number one thing [advisers] were looking for was interaction with other advisers. You can reach out and find a BDM any day of the week. Finding other advisers at a similar stage in a business to you isn’t that easy. So that became very clear very quickly.”

“We then asked the same question of people like BDMs and partners … they had the same answer. They wanted genuine interactions with advisers as well,” Mr Keniry continued.

What came out of those conversations was the birth of The Adviser Games, which seeks to provide advisers with a unique opportunity to both take part in a fun, collaborative day of activities while brushing up on their industry knowledge.

This included “hybrid” challenges across a number of stops throughout the day, such as mini golf combined with industry trivia.

With the first in what will be a series of events having wrapped up earlier this month, advisers have praised the PD day overhaul.

Queensland-based boutique firm Accomplish Wealth took to LinkedIn to say that the event was a great opportunity to “level up” their “finance game”.

“We’re always striving to improve our service and today was a great chance to learn and do this,” the firm wrote.

A number of other advisers have also documented some of the challenges they were tasked with completing during the “amazing race” style day.

Mr Keniry said that rebranding PD days to be engaging and collaborative, rather than the traditional route of having to sit through slides, presents an unprecedented opportunity for advisers to form connections with other professionals that they might otherwise not have.

“It’s really about making that community,” Mr Keniry noted.

“Advisers were coming up to us after the event sort of saying ‘Hey, I just spent six hours with these advisers I never have met, never would have met before and they’re now contacts that I’ll use for years to come’,” he concluded.

To hear more from Conaill Keniry, tune in here.