Oh wow, oh wow, what a time we had at the Glasgow Science Centre yesterday for HomeGame 5: New Blood, which has now become known as Hoga Meme 5. For why? Because…well, just look at the logo.
The thick end of 400 folk joined us, making this one of the larger planning conferences in Scotland that I can remember, and there were highlights aplenty. I am fully aware that Bloke Who Put On Event Bangs On About Event is tiresome for anyone who was not there, but you’re fully in control of your own Wednesday lunchtime and this is what you’re getting if you keep reading and also I think it might actually be alright.
Because although I’m tempted to bang on about how amazing everything and everyone was – and that’s not hyperbole and I almost never feel happy about our events – that’s not what matters with this one.
What matters is that we had well over 100 young people, students and career changers in the room, and our collective job was to make them think that financial planning sounded like a decent career. I’ve written here before about why we need to do that, but it’s axiomatic in any case.
New research we premiered yesterday with YouGov and in association with Morningstar Wealth found that amongst 16-23 year olds – now make sure you’re sitting down – financial planning doesn’t feature very highly as a potential career choice. I’m not saying it’s lurking down there with traffic warden, but it’s certainly not great. (We’ve got some great vox pops from that research of young’uns saying what they think a financial planner looks like and acts like; the word “arrogant” features as does “blue suit”, but interestingly “Tesla”, “pizza oven” and “podcast” didn’t come up).
But for those who came to Glasgow yesterday, 80% now say they think planning looks very attractive as a potential career choice. Not scientific, despite being done in the Science Centre, but not a bad result.
So that’s great – if you expose people to what planning is then they think it’s good. One thing that helped enormously with that was our Financial Planning Live session, where Jenny and Nicola Ellis from Wellington Wealth in Glasgow underwent a br00tal trial of having to do an initial meeting and then a live cashflow presentation with an actor, live on stage with what they were doing being beamed onto an IMAX screen behind them, and no idea of what the scenario we’d planned for them was before they got there. Unbelievable skills from them, and huge bravery to put, frankly, their reputations on the line. You had to be there to see it. Amazing.
But on top of that, and on top of all the conversations onstage and off, and the comedians, and the huge efforts the sponsors went to to make it a great experience for the young folk in the audience, there’s one bit that stands out and I thought I’d put it into your minds too.
Dilraj Sokhi-Watson is director of Equate Scotland, which is a policy shop and development organisation looking at ensuring more equal gender representation in STEM, which happens to include financial services. She was talking about how important it is to give young people a proper sense of what their career will be like; many seek linearity which is why they head for law, accounting, big consulting and so on. These have clear career paths and are easy to describe to students at milkround time.
The problem is, that linearity is fading. The very predictability of those jobs means that AI views them very much the same way as my cat views the packet of Dreamies on my desk. Big law firms and big consultancies aren’t immune from financial pressures and it’s not unusual for entire intakes to find themselves with a box in their hands on the street wondering what just happened. Most fee earning professions are like this. And working for big names is no shelter; there is no security left.
So Dilraj said that she tells young people to expect their careers to be “squiggly”. Not a straight line. And I think that’s just one of the most brilliant descriptions I’ve ever heard.
I think young people coming into our sector can expect a squiggly career. One does not simply walk into Mordor and become a fully fledged financial planner. There are many twists and turns along the way. And those are good things; they give people the chance to stress test their ambitions; maybe they’d rather focus on more techy things. Maybe they might head off to Investment World. Maybe they become a world class compliance bore who nitpicks on the chat during industry events while hiding their real name. Who knows?
The profession and the industry are rushing to show young people pathways into advice and planning, and the temptation is to show them linear career progression. But – as we heard from Jenny and Nicola, and also Adrian Murphy and Cathi Harrison and more – it doesn’t work like that in real life. I wonder if there’s a way to still attract new blood, but help these fresh faces to Embrace The Squiggle. I Embrace The Squiggle. Do you?
PS we’re going to do New Blood 2 in London in February. There will be another FP Live with a new set of crazy, brilliant planners and an actor, and a whole bunch of students, career changers and young’uns again. You might like to come along.
Your music choice this week is…well, a celebration of Glasgow in a way, I suppose, by one of its most talented sons, Aidan Moffat (of Arab Strap) and Fa’kirk’s Bill Wells. Glasgow Jubilee is hilarious, pretty scurrilous and has a LOT of adult themes and bad language, but then so does Glasgow and that’s just one of the reasons that even this East Coaster loves it. Approach with some caution.
