Brokerages have cut back on training costs since the financial crisis to boost profits, helping increase the average age of advisers at the biggest firms last year to 53, up from 48 in 2009, Daly said. To maintain their ranks, they’re paying millions of dollars in bonuses to lure experienced advisers, said Howard Diamond, a recruiter in Chester, New Jersey.

“It’s an eat-what-you-kill kind of industry, and unless you can hit the ground running, the firms are just not that interested in you,” Diamond said.

Morgan Stanley, which has 16,000 brokers, more than any other firm, last year reduced its trainee class to 1,250 from 2,000 to cut costs, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said on a conference call in July. Christine Jockle, a spokeswoman for the firm, said the smaller training program is still sufficient to replace advisers who leave.

Weill, Icahn

Bank of America plans to hire at least 1,200 trainees this year at its Merrill Lynch brokerage unit, which has the second- most advisers, down from 2,500 in 2012, according to Susan McCabe, a spokeswoman for the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank. She said the fluctuation was normal and declined to say how big the training program was previously.

“Nearly 80 percent of our revenue comes from people who started in the training program,” Dwight Mathis, head of new adviser strategy at Merrill Lynch, said in an interview.

Selling stocks to individual investors has long been a way into Wall Street for young men with little experience. Former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sanford I. “Sandy” Weill started his career as a broker at Bear Stearns Cos. He was so shy at the time that his wife would call him at the office to remind him to pick up the phone and find clients, according to “Tearing Down the Walls,” a 2003 biography by Monica Langley.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s first Wall Street job was at Dreyfus & Co., according to his website. A former colleague who asked not to be identified because he still works in the industry said he knew Icahn would be successful when the colleague was trying to pick up a woman at a dance at a Catskills resort and saw Icahn sign up her father as a client. Icahn and Weill didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

‘Dreary Process’

“We were viewed back then as having a lot of information that no one else had,” said David McWilliams, who became a broker in 1978 when he was 21 and now heads wealth-management transformation at the U.S. brokerage of Zurich-based UBS. “You couldn’t get a stock quote without calling us.”