Hello, welcome to the Hollow Weeks, where the Update falls on stony ground as you all head off to wherever it is you go in August to seek skin damage, alcoholic oblivion, a glimpse of a better, bucolic life you will promise yourself is part of your future but which you will never achieve, or meaningless encounters in sticky-floored bars over equally sticky macro-produced industrial cocktails. Have fun. Actually do. You’ve earned it.
While you enrich Michael O’Leary, the PFS is getting spendy to promote financial planning as a profession. One million of your imperial credits of the realm is on the table, and you know what they say – a million here, a million there, soon adds up to real money.
If you’ve been reading the Update you’ll know that we’re up to not dissimilar stuff, albeit with a much smaller budget. Getting new blood into the planning profession is what our 30 September event in Glasgow is all about, and the reaction to it has been so positive that we’re going to go for a similar structure except all English-y for our London event on 4 February next year.
The PFS has more financial firepower than we do, and so can pay for putting folk through diplomas and put money into programmes with further education establishments and all that, which is excellent. Everything which gets new blood into the sector on a conscious, intentional basis rather than falling into it the way so many of us did is a step in the right direction.
As part of HomeGame 5 we’ll be commissioning YouGov to carry out some bespoke, targeted research with young people and educators about what the profession needs to do to look attractive. But we’ve already heard a lot from the various chats we’ve had in getting our audience in place for Glasgow (at least a third of the audience will be students or career-changers), and I thought I might leave a couple of the key bits here for your consideration.
First up is structure. It’s a feature of most professions, especially those in professional services, that there is a structured, commonly understood career path. That path does exist in patches in the advice profession, but it’s not universal and it’s not well communicated. What can a young person thinking about going into this profession during their qualification-gathering phase do? What does one year PQ look like? Two years? Will they be doing 14-hour days like the solicitors? What’s the upside eventually if they do that? This feels like something where the PFS could definitely have an impact; not in terms of changing what firms do for new hires, but in terms of getting a strong messaging structure for the outside world.
Second is fear of selling. Yes, everyone sells something, even if it’s only their labour on a Wednesday morning in the hope of views on an Update. But at some point we need to be able to say with confidence to the ether – for that’s where this audience plucks their news from – that no, you won’t be sat down with a phone book and a phone and told to start calling and selling. No-one will ask them to sell them this pen, to grind, to hustle and so on, unless that’s their thing. This is a huge inhibitor for many, many people – but conversely, if they’re shown that they’ll have conversations with meaning, and genuinely help people, then that thinking reframes itself very quickly.
Third and final for now is fear of maths. Dying is easy, math is hard, they say…and while there are of course many highly numerate young folk, I’d posit many of them would rather be heading down the CFA route than the CFP. So we need the humanities, social sciences and arts kids to look at planning too – and if this profession is to be human-centred rather than money-centred, then they will do just that – but we have to make the case.
Anyway. It’s all good. I’m excited and quite intimidated to have a completely different audience (at least in part) in September, and I hope the PFS folks are feeling something similar with their endeavours. One good thing – none of them will have heard my jokes before, so that extends this Gen X’ers shelf life by oooh, a good few months.
“OK Dad, that’s enough.”
For your music choice, I thought about another Black Sabbath or Ozzy song but – and this doesn’t happen often – you have to give Mike his due for picking Planet Caravan last week. I might have gone Snowblind, but it was still a good choice. Instead, let’s have Suede’s new song Dancing With The Europeans, for no better reason than I suppose many of you are in Europe right now, and dancing is one of the things you could be doing.
