"Making the Grade"

IFA Magazine, February 2011

The underpinning of a profession is often based on tertiary degrees and the financial planning sector is finally heading down this path. Victoria Papandrea finds out what the FPA's new education qualifications mean for various industry stakeholders.

'... On the other hand, Mentor Education Group managing director Mark Sinclair argues there is a current gap for existing financial advisers to have an education pathway towards the degree program.

"While they all have a diploma qualification and many have an advanced diploma qualification, what we're looking for is a pathway for those people whi in a defined time period, say 2015 or later, to actually step up towards bridging the gap to getting a degree," Sinclair explains.

In addition, he says he believes there needs to be much more rigour around continuing professional development (CPD), which he notes has a significant role to play in the education pathway of financial planners.

"To date CPD has been loosely, regulated, there is a requirement for it but some dealer groups require their advisers to do 30 CPD points a year, others 20, some 10, and some dealer groups don't do any and they leave it to the individual adviser," he observes.

"Further to setting or perhaps even mandating targets for CPD, he says another area that requires more rigour is the actual assessment of these courses.

"Some CPD can be structured and some unstructured, so assessed or not assessed, and I think it all needs to be assessed for it to have rigour, and then the level of assessment needs to be of a certain standard," he explains.'

For the full article, see IFA Magazine, February 2011.