Is financial advice made an attractive career prospect?

How many times did your careers adviser suggest to you at school or college that you might like to be a 'financial adviser'?

If they were anything like mine, I doubt very much if they mentioned it once. Is it the industry itself that is seen as an unattractive career choice or is it the fact that its not advertised heavily and pushed like other career options such as 'nursing' or 'teaching'. The financial adviser should be of no less value than those careers. Arranging someones finances to enable them to achieve their dreams is a noble idea certainly and one that should be marketed. The reality however is that an industry that has seen better days in terms of consumer confidence is awash with people that don't generate much in the way of trust - no offence to the hundreds of thousands of very, very good professionals out there - its more that one or two bad eggs that are heavily publicised have more effect on the uptake of a new generation of advisers than the good ones do.

So what can the financial services industry do to make itself a wholly more attractive career proposition? Can they offer FS exams as a supplementary addition to the curriculum? work experience shadowing financial advisers, apprenticeships perhaps? Cash incentives like the golden handshakes offered to teachers?

They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity, I beg to differ, given the pounding the FS industry is taking at the moment in the media, however, I think the best thing that financial services can do to make itself more attractive as a career choice, is clean up its act, regulate itself more critically, make itself whiter than white and restore consumer confidence in what to date has been to most, a shadowy law unto itself. Only then will we see more younger people entering the industry.