Taking Off The Cape: Financial Advisory Journey From Novice To Hero To Guide

The opportunities for financial advisor education have improved so dramatically in the past 25 years. When I graduated from college with a generic business and finance degree, only a couple of mainstream colleges were known for doing anything with financial planning and virtually no degree programs were available. Now, more than 200 degree programs are available at the bachelor’s, master’s, and even doctoral levels.

The CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designation was a thing back then, but today, there are many more (and better) paths to satisfy the education requirement, and the number of CFP® practitioners has almost tripled. While the vast majority of my training to be a financial advisor came on the job and through self-study, today the opportunities for building that base level of education in the practice are plentiful.