New financial planners are entering the advice business through a mix of college programs, career pivots, and firm-run internships, but the industry’s hiring problem is increasingly showing up as a training problem: Getting new entrants to a baseline of client-ready skills without relying on poaching experienced staff from competitors.
“Firms are realizing more and more that training is really important,” Hannah Moore, founder of Amplified Planning, said in an interview with InvestmentNews.
While the war for talent continues to play out through aggressive recruitment campaigns across the RIA space and beyond, Moore – the owner of Dallas-based Guiding Wealth, who also runs Amplified Planning's Externship program – sees a growing acknowledgment that the strategy of hiring CFP holders can only go so far.
“You can only recruit from other firms so much,” she said. "The firms that really have the competitive advantage are the ones who understand how to train their talent once they get in this space."
The Externship – a virtual summer training program for aspiring and early-career financial planners – is set to return for its seventh year in June.
Since launching in 2020, more than 6,500 college students, new advisors, CFP candidates, and career-changers have gone through the eight-week course, and more than 2,000 participants are expected to sign up this year, making it the largest class in the program's history.
According to Moore, more and more career-changers are breaking into the financial planning space through The Externship. Those professional pivoters represent an exciting talent stream, she argues, as they bring unique skill sets that new graduates don't necessarily possess.
"They already know how to have a professional conversation. They already know how to make high-level decisions," she said. "It is so inspiring to see how many people are coming into this field with their unique perspective."
In conferences and conversations with advisors, Moore said the issue of the oncoming talent shortage – with an estimated shortfall of 100,000 advisors in the next decade, according to McKinsey – is a recurring theme. And while the productivity boost from AI adoption is helping to bridge that gap, she's convinced it will take a human solution to address the crisis.
"We have an incredibly fulfilling career as financial planners, helping clients achieve their goals. The folks coming in see this opportunity," she said. "Across the workforce in general in this country, people are looking for changes. We’re still dealing with Covid exhaustion, people reevaluating [their careers], and we’re giving them a really good place to step into next."
Moore said the majority of people staging their second act in financial planning are taking a pay cut to do so, but it's a tradeoff they're more than happy to do as they see real meaning in the work. For those individuals, she says The Externship helps reduce a barrier as it eliminates the risk of taking a drastic career leap right away.
"You’re not able to quit your job for two months, go explore what this career looks like, and then go back to your day job. That’s not practical," Moore said. "We’ve created an avenue that increases access to people who are interested in this space."
As the wealth industry becomes more planning-focused, Moore says onboarding has increasingly become about simulating the day-to-day work of client meetings, planning deliverables, and the software tools that connect them. For this year, The Externship curriculum will include recorded client meetings, expert-led training and hands-on planning assignments.
“Programs like The Externship give future advisors a real-world view of financial planning in practice,” K. Dane Snowden, who stepped in as CEO of CFP Board last month, said in a release announcing the upcoming summer program.
Aside from a new mobile-friendly learning platform, The Externship has updated its circle of backers by welcoming Nitrogen and Holistiplan – which both featured prominently across multiple categories in the recently released T3 Advisortech 2026 survey report – as technology partners.
"We want to be incredibly relevant for our Externship participants and give them the tools they’re going to see when they start working," Moore said. "We used Nitrogen when they were Riskalyze, so we're excited to reintroduce them, and I use Holistiplan on a weekly basis within my firm."
While the advice industry is famously male-dominated, Moore estimates abotu 45% of enrollees at The Externship are women, and 35% to 40% are people of color. She also sees applicants and participants from across the age spectrum, shattering expectations of the program being just for 18- to 22-year-old career starters.
"We're seeing more and more firms use The Externship as part of their internship program," Moore added. "We're having more firms in the independent RIA space right now, but we're also getting interest from a much broader scope, which is fun."
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