Australian advice students missing out on practical learning opportunities

Reflecting on her experiences with higher education, aspiring financial adviser Ishwa Pandya said the methods of teaching are considerably different between India and Australia, with the latter favouring a somewhat dated approach.

Having started her financial advice education in India at Ahmedabad University and Gujarat University, Pandya said the university took a very practical approach to teaching and even ensured that its students became familiar with using the platforms and technology used in the advice profession.

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“Everything was exactly the same thanks to the dean and the professors. For me, it was never a thing because I had the privilege to go to one of the premium universities,” Pandya said.

“This all made sense to me a lot more, and there was nothing that I was changing, like everything to us was practical. But there are still a lot of other universities who do run it in the theoretical way.”

Pandya added: “I was privileged … But someone who has not had that privilege to study in such a good university back in India would struggle a lot with these issues.”

After completing her undergraduate and postgraduate studies, Pandya moved to Australia to attend the University of South Australia and acquire a master’s in financial planning and services, though she found that the approach to teaching was not quite what she had expected.

“There was a time where we were expected in an assessment to draft an SOA and that too, now everybody is using systems, for us it was to do it all manually via Excel, which nobody in the industry does that anymore, because you have got updated systems,” she said.

“You need to show your students, to learn those systems, rather than telling them to get an Excel sheet, draft a whole SOA, which did make things a lot more complicated.”

While her experiences in the Australian higher education system leant more on the theoretical approach, Pandya said she did have one lecturer who had recent experience working in an advice firm, making him far more inclined to take a more practical approach to learning.

“For us, from his experience, we did learn a lot, and he used to teach us a lot more about practical skills, but it was only two lectures. Other lecturers were more theoretical, which I think makes sense. So, I would say that I did make out a lot from his lectures, but all the other lectures weren’t that useful,” she said.

Reliance on theory hindering future employment

Though she has recently taken up a post as associate adviser at Bravium Financial Planning, Pandya suggested that the lack of practical skills creates a real barrier when attempting to enter the workforce as employers favour those that will require less training.

“When you go and sit into that interview, there will be so many other things which they would be expecting you to know, which you don’t know. Which did happen for us. We thought we know everything, but we don’t know anything.” she said.

As a means of remedying this, Pandya said students should have to undertake a mandatory internship as part of their studies to give them valuable hands-on experience. Additionally, she suggested that prospective advisers would benefit from an effective communication course in preparation of engaging with clients.

“Make it like a requirement for six months, so that people learn those soft skills and put a course for effective communication because being an adviser, it’s very, very important to communicate,” she said.

“And I feel it’s not just the communication, the right time when you have to speak, emotions are attached. There’s a lot more things attached. So you need to make them understand this, rather than just giving them theoretical knowledge.”

Speaking with ifa last year, Bravium founder Scott Farmer said he has made a point of training professional year (PY) advisers to “genuinely add value” for clients, ensuring a markedly different experience compared with prior generations of institutional trained advisers.

“The training that we’re doing is vastly different to what happened through the banks,” Farmer said.

“For us, when we’re working with these professional year students, and even just the associates, it’s really helping them understand how to have interventional conversations with clients, because that’s where a lot of the deep value lies that you miss if you’re just selling or thinking about the best strategies and what the best products are for this client.

“If you’re not dealing with the deeper issues, you’ll never get the outcomes for the clients that you need. And that’s actually really hard to teach people.”