It appears that Wall Street brokerage training programs have not been successful in developing young sales talent with longevity.
My experience as Marketing Director of Willis-Consulting, Inc. points to a massive void in the number of financial advisors with less than five years experience working in major brokerage firms.
Why the high turnover one might ask?
We, as financial services recruiters, see this occurring in the past decade due to the trend that newly licensed brokers employed by major Wall Street firms are encouraged to build their book targeting fee based accounts.
Speak to any of these “rookie” financial advisors and they will tell you it takes three to four years to build a fee based book of accounts to the level where a broker can transition unencumbered from a salary environment to 100% commissioned earnings. And the truth of the matter is that major financial firms do not keep their young fnancial advisors on a salary basis for more than twenty-four months!
OK, so what happens? The trainee is forced to set unreasonable assets target, setting himself up for certain failure and when the assets target is not met, they are asked to leave the training program!
This seems to point to Wall Street firms needing to address the expectations of their training programs if their goal is to retain their rookie FAs.