Career changers as a ‘triage nurse’ in advice firms

As the profession seeks to bolster the number of advisers and navigate the high education standards for the profession, Ryan Watson, chief executive of Tribeca Financial, explained how career changers are equipped to play a unique role in advice practices.

Appearing on a recent episode of The ifa Show, Watson said those who transition to advice from another profession bring important skills and life experience that they could use in ways other than becoming a traditional financial adviser.

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“They’re looking for a constructive change and they bring that energy and that experience, which I think helps when you’re giving advice to clients,” Watson said.

“I think, potentially, career transition could fit people who won’t be a qualified financial adviser, but they might be more a goals-based coach.”

He noted that the emotional and intellectual intelligence that comes from their prior experiences makes them uniquely qualified to act as a caretaker to clients and young advisers.

“We haven’t done it, but we’ve thought about what if it was a triage nurse or someone who’d worked in high-pressure situations, that had good IQ but also EQ, they had good empathy, they could build trust with people, because a significant part of advice, as we see it, is building trust and then having a detailed goal-setting process, long term, medium term, and then now,” Watson said.

He explained that someone in this role would help “nurture the younger generation of university professionals to build the advice” and help them foster trust with clients.

In addition to having important transferable skills, Watson said career changers often also have more life experience than traditional new talent, allowing them to draw on their emotional intelligence to navigate complex emotional situations with clients.

“We often find that new clients come in with explicit needs, some they’ve picked up themselves, but also some societal norms. The real gold, we find, happens when we can help them define their implicit needs.

“The trust is there, potentially, if it’s a partnered couple, and you get one look at the other and they say, ‘I’ve never heard you say that’. And it’s 30 years of marriage. For someone to have the EQ to have that conversation, that’s where the gold is. Then the financial is only a component of that.

“The people that we love working with are really focused on family, friends, holidays, hobbies, and experiences. So, there’s so much more to that wellbeing spectrum that’s not financial.”

Watson explained that the idea of employing career changers as such is simply a “working hypothesis” and his firm doesn’t currently have any structures in place to support this role in the business, but there are potential “medium term” plans to implement this.

To hear more from Ryan Watson, tune in here.