More than 15 years ago, a paraplanner at a Philadelphia-based registered investment advisory firm approached management with the idea of establishing a formal career path. Stephanie James described herself at the time as “very green right out of college” but eager to learn the field. When she found out that the certified financial planner credential was one of the top professional achievements for advisors at Wescott, she wanted to know what would come next.
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Today, James is a partner, managing director of advisor services and a senior financial advisor with Wescott, which has more than double the advisors and employees than it did when she started there. Advisors now pursue their professional development at the firm on a five-stage track: assistant financial advisor, associate financial advisor, financial advisor, senior advisor and principal.
“There wasn’t really a career track that was formalized, and that was the start of it. I did ask, ‘Is there a way I could take a shot at trying to draft a career path?'” James said, noting the firm’s advisors now follow an outlined guide with expectations and milestones at each stage focusing on client, team and firm responsibilities. “That advisor career path has stayed true the whole time and really helped us kind of structure the company.”
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2 case studies in response to an industry-wide challenge
In 2010, the firm, which has about 25 advisors and 25 other employees and manages $4 billion in client assets, established that career track for advisors — a process that industry growth experts say many other firms have failed to create.
RIAs that have career development tracks or paths have invested in retention of advisors and other talent in a way that fuels sustainable expansion and ensures that the firms have the people necessary to carry out succession plans (which are also frequently missing). Without even calculating the impact of advisor retirements, attrition or new firm launches, RIAs must hire 70,000 staff members simply to keep up with their current growth, according to Charles Schwab’s 2025 RIA Compensation Report. Another recent study suggested the industry will fall 100,000 advisors short of client demand by 2034.
So firms like Wescott and St. Louis-based Moneta Group Investment Advisors, which has been the No. 1 firm on Financial Planning’s RIA Leaders ranking of the largest fee-only planning firms for the past two years, are getting ahead of the challenge with structured career paths wide enough for advisors to find their own lanes with directional guidance from experienced mentors.
Moneta Group
Last month, planner Lindsay Taylor completed Moneta’s “partner in training” program alongside two colleagues. Prospective partners usually spend anywhere from two to five years fulfilling requirements like 200 hours of classroom instruction in the areas of practice management, business development, client relationship and leadership, competency evaluations and a final vote by the company’s board. The proof of the program’s success showed up on Taylor’s team with a founding partner’s retirement last year, she noted.
“It’s imperative to be able to communicate to clients that there’s a plan in place for after the current generation retires,” Taylor said. “We’ve seen how important that is and during that time we maintained 100% client retention. So that’s been incredibly important, and it wouldn’t have been possible without a runway of development of the next generation of financial advisor leaders.”
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Everyone’s vested interest
But advisors like Taylor and practice management experts point out that advisor career development programs don’t create themselves overnight. And they’ve become essential to any type of growth, according to Jeffrey Czajka, a consultant who is the founder of Advisor Growth Solutions and the former head of LPL Financial’s Independent Advisor Institute.
Whether firms are seeking to boost their services, raise their fees, generate prospective customer leads and client conversions or simply buy other advisory businesses, they will need to train next-generation advisors, Czajka said in a webinar last week. The high failure rates among rookie advisors demonstrate that many firms are struggling there. So his firm and others offer an outsourced training and development program for generation-two advisors.
“If you’re looking at growing revenue, it comes down to one question when it comes to adding the advisor, and that question is, how do you do it?” Czajka said. “You know how to be an advisor. You know how to work with clients, design portfolios, manage the investments, create a financial plan and execute on that. But nowhere in there do advisors ever get taught how to develop a Gen-2 advisor.”
The RIAs and other advisory practices with the most effective career programs “identify what someone is good at, what they love doing, and they help people spend as much time on those skillsets as possible,” according to Steven Tenney, a former advisor who founded consulting and coaching firm Grandview & Company and wrote a book called “RIA Succession Alpha.” The training and, eventually, ownership stakes in compensation for the emerging advisor talent pay off down the line for everyone, Tenney said.
“The firm becomes more valuable, because the next generation is really established and there’s continuity at the firm in terms of leadership, management and how the whole thing operates,” he said. “That’s a wonderful incentive to keep people in the seat, and it starts to develop their long-term orientation. They start to develop the muscles that are needed to look at their work from a long-term lens, as opposed to just what is best to do today.”
To invest in the level of service demanded by clients and create opportunities for talent to develop, Moneta has “focused on internal succession” through its partnership program, said the firm’s CEO and chairman, Eric Kittner. In addition, it has a company-wide training track for its more than 570 employees called Moneta University. The firm is fully owned by its partners, rather than any outside investors such as a private equity firm.
“We’re committed to growing,” Kittner said. “The only way we can remain independent is to find and build that internal talent pool.”
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Finding success by avoiding pitfalls
Taylor initially viewed the business development aspect of Moneta’s partnership program as the toughest aspect, until the former estate planning attorney learned from training and mentors how “to link my experience and passion to my business development plan.” In her case, the difficulty of navigating a divorce led her toward a niche “engaging the less financially educated party in the relationship” and thinking of the client outreach not “as a mountain you have to climb, but just as an everyday opportunity to help people,” Taylor said.
Of course, quarterly meetings with four different mentors guiding each focus area of the training, monthly training sessions and regular tracking and accountability metrics aided her path forward as well. Much as the industry fails to advance young and career-changing advisors, some less-tenured professionals who have the end goal of an RIA role like partner are trying to reach it without fully immersing themselves in the profession first, she said.
“I see a lot of new individuals that have entered this career that are anxious to grow, perhaps, in title more than work,” Taylor said. “I think it’s important that you’re really patient in the process and that, ultimately, you understand that knowing your job well is the first requirement to not only be a good advisor but to grow in your role and develop your business.”
Wescott
Another pitfall comes from hammering out a rigid career track that doesn’t give advisors room for their own forms of professional development, according to James. That can impede the firm from tracking their advancement using metrics that apply to their specific skills and goals, and it can limit their compensation to a fixed range that doesn’t fit the breadth of their contributions or the firm’s resolve to retain them for the long term, she said. Wescott’s career track lays down a rough outline, but not an overly proscriptive one across the five levels of advisors at the firm.
“As you progress through the different levels, you find that there are different paths,” James said. “It’s kind of our starting point, our guide. And from there, it becomes more personal one-on-one career building with each manager for the advisors.”
