PROFILES
Three young 'uns become advisers
Fidelity Life has seen graduates from its financial adviser training programme enter the industry. Jenni McManus speaks with three of them.
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BY JENNI MCMANUS
i delity’s Career Connect programme aims to kick start the
careers of the next generation of financial advisers. Not just that it also aims to support a more accessible, diverse and sustainable advice industry. Scholarships, worth up to $5,000 each, are awarded to outstanding applicants from groups typically under-represented within the financial services sector including Maori, Pasifika and women. Fidelity Life chief sales and service officer Bronwyn Kirwan says she was encouraged by the first scholarship recipients’ diverse
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backgrounds, spanning different regions, cultures, lifestyles, and professions. “The interest we’ve had in the first Career connect intake has been amazing. We received almost 30 submissions for the scholarships alone and were highly impressed by the calibre of applicants. She says the judging panel focused on candidates’ ability to display the soft skills needed to be a great financial adviser. These include great communication skills, strong interpersonal and relationship building skills, interest in the sector and how they hoped to serve their communities once becoming a qualified financial adviser.
Covid switcharoo
or trainee insurance adviser Stephanie Wilson, the decision to switch careers was made during the long, dark days of Auckland’s Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. With time on her hands to reflect on where her life was (or wasn’t) heading, Wilson says she realised neither she nor her friends had a firm grip on their finances, and few clues about how to plan for the future. At the time, Wilson was working in government funding and grants but she had also done a stint in emergency management and disaster planning at Auckland Council. So she well understood the precarious position people could find themselves in if they had little, or no, insurance cover. “I spent a lot of time learning,” she says. “I really wanted to work in financial services because I think there's a lot of opportunity to help people understand their finances, look at long-term planning, what the benefits of insurance are. A friend sent me the link to the [Fidelity Career Connect] course and I thought it was a great opportunity because you get the qualification, but you also get industry skills. So, that was my motivation to get into it.” Wilson signed up for the part-time course at the beginning of this year and walked into a job – as client services manager at Johny Winstone’s Insurance Market Collective – when she graduated in July. The plan is that by
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early next year, Wilson will be a fully-fledged insurance adviser. “I wanted to start in a supporting role just to get a handle on working in insurance because I'm from out of the industry, so I've never worked in this space before,” she says. “So I'm currently doing that role as well as progressing into an adviser role. I’m working on getting my registration and on getting set up with all the different insurers and doing the product accreditation. It’s pretty busy but I'm enjoying the balance.” At 30, Wilson was one of the younger members on the course. Ages for the first intake ranged from 30 to about 55 and 50% of the participants were women. According to Fidelity’s Solutions Manager Sarahmay Butterfield, more than 110 people, representing 16 different cultures, applied for the two intakes this year but only 15 were accepted for each course. The course itself comprises a weekly Zoom session and several bolt-on modules covering topics such as lead generation, codes of conduct, engaging with clients and personal branding. Participants are also expected to achieve the New Zealand Certificate in Financial Services Level 5 (life and health insurance). Wilson says she particularly liked the structure of the course. “It was a supportive, group-learning environment. I found it gave me a really solid understanding of the legislative context, the regulation that is the
foundational knowledge you need to have to work in this industry. But I also really loved that there were the industry skills as well. And also that there was a focus on having good customer conversations. “As someone who's got a background in customerfacing roles, I thought that was really important because you're talking about quite unpleasant topics sometimes, like getting people to think about what would happen if their partner were to pass away. So I really thought that aspect of it was really valuable.” “I thought the course was a great opportunity. It helped make it less intimidating to join a new industry. A
