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Career changers account for nearly 40% of new financial planners
Amplified Planning and Schwab Advisor Services research puts career changers at nearly 40% of new financial planners. Most come from outside banking, insurance and accounting, and two of the three advisors profiled studied while their old jobs still paid them.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- CFP Board data from 2023 counts 34% of certified planners as having previously worked in unrelated fields.
- About a third of career changers come from banking, insurance or accounting and 40% from public-facing work such as sales and hospitality, the CFP Board's Lisa Davis said.
- Certification requires a bachelor's degree, planning coursework, 4,000 to 6,000 hours of experience, an exam and an ethics requirement.
- The CFP Board launched its first career-changer scholarship this year, paying up to $5,000 per student in a certificate-level program aimed at women planners.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction If Davis's breakdown applies to the Board's count, a third of the so-called unrelated career changers came from finance-adjacent jobs, so hiring beyond finance adds less than the 34% headline suggests.
- cost When candidates retrain while an old employer still pays them, as Herr and Jepson did, the advisory firm that later hires them avoids paying for the coursework.
- exposure Going by July's 66% pass rate, a firm that puts a career changer on payroll before the exam faces a failure rate of about one in three.
The two shares count different populations. The CFP Board's 34% covers every certified planner in its 2023 data [2], while the Amplified Planning and Schwab Advisor Services figure of nearly 40% covers new planners only [1]. Taken together, entrants run about 6 points above the existing base of certified planners [1]. These are separate studies with their own definitions, so treat the 6 points as a direction and not a precise number.
The word "unrelated" needs the same care. If Davis's finance-adjacent third applies to the Board's 34%, about 11 points of certified planners came from banking, insurance or accounting [3][2]. A firm that recruits only from finance already reaches those people. A career-changer program would add the other 23 points or so [2].
The profiled advisors show who paid to retrain. Emily Bandoni taught high-school math in Boston for four years before becoming a CFP and wealth advisor at Gainline Financial Partners [10]. Bryan Jepson spent 30 years in emergency medicine, earned a master's in finance while still practicing, became a CFP and retired from medicine in February [11]. George Herr, a 30-year Ford engineer now at Mercer Advisors, went to night school for the CFP coursework two years before a planned 2020 retirement [12]. "I found that even though I was busier during the process of starting this new career, I was more energized and less burned out," Jepson said [14].
The Board's own cash is modest. It has awarded $3.4 million in scholarships since 2016, Davis said [7]. Split into maximum-size career-changer awards, that total would fund 680 students [3].
Coursework can be done at night, as Herr did. The experience hours are harder to build up without a job. I'd expect that stage to be where a firm's willingness to hire a former teacher or engineer decides whether the candidate finishes.
This could go a few ways. If the flow is mostly people pushed out of other fields, firms get the pool whether or not they build anything for it. Jepson said emergency doctors have the highest burnout rate in medicine and work nights, weekends and holidays [15]. "My day never ended," Herr said of his engineering job [13]. If the pull is the job itself, then the motivators Davis listed (purpose, helping people, flexibility and pay) [9] put the competition in schedules and roles. Herr's current job runs closer to nine-to-five [16]. A firm's training program adds planners the market would not otherwise supply only if the experience hours are the bottleneck.
In my view the evidence establishes how big the pool is. It says much less about firms: the source does not include any firm's hiring counts or training budget. The case for a firm-built program depends on the experience stage. It fails if firms without such programs hire career changers at the same rate as firms that run them.
What to watch
- The next CFP Board count of certificants from unrelated fields, to see whether the roughly 6-point gap between new and existing planners holds.
- Whether advisory firms publish career-changer hiring counts or fund the experience-hours stage, the firm-level evidence the pool argument still needs.
- CFP exam pass rates in later sittings against July's 66%, which set the risk of hiring candidates before they pass.