Wealth managers are placing greater focus on training their advisors in skills designed to help their businesses grow.

In one example, Osaic, a wealth management platform headquartered in Phoenix, has created the Wealth Advisor Academy, a professional development initiative for financial professionals, that is designed to enhance their skills to set them up for future growth, Osaic announced.

The six-month program is the latest addition to Osaic’s educational programs for advisors that combines technical knowledge with relationship management strategies, Osaic said.

The Wealth Advisor Academy “focuses on giving Osaic’s financial professionals the resources they need to build their business capabilities in a scalable and ever-improving way,” Jerry Schreck, senior vice president of advisor education and Training at Osaic, said in an interview.

“Half of the battle for many advisors is improving their listening skills so they can have better conversations with clients,” he added. The academy is designed, in part, to accomplish that, he said.

The program, which is by invitation only, will have groups of 20 to 25 advisors who will participate in two in-person and five virtual sessions and include workshops and case studies to improve advisors’ skills.

The course has been broken down into three topics: enhancing interpersonal skills, improving technical knowledge and implementing best practices for business efficient.

Participants will learn to conduct more meaningful conversations with clients, which will foster stronger relationships and improve client satisfaction; learn to use an assessment tool to improve their technical skills; and find more efficient strategies for running their businesses, which will create more time to work with clients, Schreck said.

“We are committed to equipping our financial professionals with the right tools, technology and resources to help them free up capacity, allowing them to better serve clients and grow their businesses,” Dimple Shah, Osaic's executive vice president of advisor growth and platform solutions, said in a statement.

“It is important to refresh and enhance advisors’ knowledge, which can then serve as a differentiator for the firm,” Schreck said.

St. Louis-based Edward Jones also promotes continuing education programs for its 19,500-plus advisors, according to Julie Kelly, a financial advisor at Edward Jones.

“Clients are looking for comprehensive advice to handle all of their financial needs, and Edward Jones wants to make sure its advisors have the training necessary to accomplish that,” Kelly said in an interview.

By the end of the year, 4,500 advisors will have earned their CFP designation, boosting the number of Edward Jones advisors who hold one or more educational designations or certificates to 10,400, she said. In 2022 alone, 600 advisors earned their CFP designation.

“It is becoming a badge of honor at Edward Jones to have earned professional designations,” she added. “It shows the advisors have a commitment to serving their clients.”

Edward Jones pays for its advisors to earn some certificates and creates flexible schedules to allow time for study, Kelly said. “The company provides a lot of support for advisors working toward professional certificates and we encourage other firms to do the same.”

“Advisor training provides benefits across the board and helps mitigate risks for clients,” she added.

In addition to learning how to serve clients better, training in best practices for operating a business also are needed for advisors, according to Mary Mock, senior vice president and head of distribution for Touchstone Investments, an asset manager based in Cincinnati.

A firm that operates efficiently can better serve clients and can grow as a business, she said in an interview.

“Today, most advisors are so good on the product side that they need the ability to go beyond investing advice,” she said. In order to do that, they need to run an efficient business so they can devote more time to clients. “There is a lot of interest in expanding to other services besides investing, such as tax management and estate planning, and there is always more work than there are hours available.”

Touchstone suggests advisors use third-party practice reviews, which can be “instrumental in helping financial professionals think impartially and critically about how to grow strategically, how to create efficiencies, and eventually to seamlessly transition their businesses,” Mock said.

“Practice analysis review, or PAR, as we refer to it at Touchstone Investments, is designed to help advisors to scale, reduce risk and plan strategically with the objective expertise of a coach,” she added. “No matter where an advisor is in his or her career, using the typically slower summer months to conduct a PAR can enable advisors to plan ahead before things get too busy.”

One example of Touchstone adding efficiency to a practice occurred when an advisor found himself unable to carve out the time needed to perform qualitative and quantitative analyses of his clients’ investment portfolios. 

In one case, “the advisor knew that the large number of investments in his clients’ the portfolios were a potential liability but taking time to focus on it seemed paralyzing to him,” Mock said. Touchstone analyzed the advisor’s investment portfolios, and showed him where he could be managing accounts more efficiently.

“This gave the advisor a clear roadmap for improvement and an organized and actionable way to free up his time to do what the adviser does best – providing advice to his clients,” she said.