"They wanted to create a sense of connectedness with those who could not be at the conference and/or those who could not attend every session," said Marie Swift, a communications specialist and president of Impact Communications in Leawood, Kan., who hosted the "Twitter Live!" event.
Of course, it's not only young planners coming up fresh in the industry but career changers who were trying to get toeholds at the FPA's meeting.
One of the conference attendees was R. Wallace Larson, a retiring lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who tackled his M.B.A. through online courses at California Lutheran University while still stationed in Iraq and Germany. After a 22-year career in the military (where he served as a helicopter pilot, fight instructor and aviator logistician in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and the former Yugoslavia), he decided to come back to the U.S., settle down in the Chicago area with his wife and newborn son, and pursue his passion for personal finance.
He came to the conference for several reasons, he said. "One was to meet the faculty and classmates in the online program I'd never met in person," he said. But he was also networking and trying to find employment. He passed his CFP exam this year, and though he hopes work at a firm focusing more on the planning process and less on product sales, he's been a bit chagrined to find more of the latter.
"It's harder to find jobs to learn the financial planning profession than it is to find jobs that are sales oriented," he said. He's even encountered firms where he says interviewers implied they wanted employees to drop their CFP licenses because of the FPA coalition's increased focus on hard-line fiduciary standards.
Those kinds of obstacles, in this kind of economy, were just one more reason to give advisors pause and make the sessions more serious, and even sessions on Roth conversion were full to bursting with people sitting on the floor. Several sessions covered the cracks in the different laws on fiduciary standards and a few tackled the much discussed safe-withdrawal rate for clients who've seen their portfolios tank.
"No doubt the mood was different this year," said Johannessen, who said the content was much more intense this year. "It seemed serious. The feedback I've gotten from veteran conference-goers was that content was strong this year, and sometimes you go and it's hit-or-miss."
--Eric Rasmussen