A welcome mat into financial planning

When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, the chaos spurred Hannah Moore to look inward and assess how she could really help. 

“We started looking around at the financial planning space and asking, ‘How can we help the financial planning community?’”

As the owner of Amplified Planning, Moore says the creation of her financial planning training program, the Externship, was born out of necessity during the early days of the pandemic, a period marked by uncertainty and disruption. Internships were being canceled, leaving students and aspiring planners without the crucial hands-on experience they needed to enter the field.

“We started hearing from professors whose students were losing their internships, asking, ‘What do we do?’” Moore recalls. Teaming up with the Financial Planning Association to kick off the 2020 Externship, Moore and the FPA team held focus groups with students to understand what they valued in an internship experience.

“We realized we’ll never replace that one-on-one experience, but the rest of the list we looked at and said, ‘Hey, we could get creative with this.’ That first year, it really went viral on us.”

The program, which started as a free course if you were an FPA member, saw 1,900 people sign up, with about 1,100 actively participating. Since then, Moore and the team at Amplified Planning have refined the Externship, learning valuable lessons along the way. One key insight was the realization of just how many barriers to entry exist within the financial planning profession.

“We’re kind of shortcutting that,” Moore says. For many, entering the financial planning profession requires substantial financial and time investments – “Truly, tens of thousands of dollars, years of their life before they can make the jump, and they haven't actually seen what a financial planner does.” 

The Externship addresses this by providing participants with a comprehensive, immersive experience. The program spans eight weeks, each dedicated to a different area of financial planning, such as investment planning, insurance, and estate planning.

“We bring in experts – three experts for each topic – who do financial planning differently,” Moore explains. These experts come from diverse backgrounds and serve different clientele, offering participants a broad perspective on the profession. Additionally, participants have access to live office hours with these experts, allowing them to ask questions and engage directly with industry leaders. 

Moreover, the program provides participants with access to real financial planning technology and enables them to work on actual client cases.

“We bring in real clients of mine, so they’re getting to see financial planning in action,” Moore says.

The impact of Moore’s Externship extends beyond just the participants; it’s helping to shape the future of the financial planning profession itself.

“We want to be viewed as a welcome mat into financial planning,” she says. The demographics of the program’s participants reflect this diversity, drawing individuals from various backgrounds, including career changers, stay-at-home parents re-entering the workforce, and undecided college majors.

“But the thing that connects them is that they really want to help people,” Moore says.

Moore’s vision for the Externship goes beyond merely preparing participants for entry-level roles; she aims to shorten the learning curve that often hinders success in the profession.

“We want to make sure they are trained, that they are ready to go,” she says. “We just talked to a firm this morning that has hired several of our externs, and they reached out to us because they’re like, ‘The experience and the skills that [the externs] have coming in, they’re ready to hit the ground running.’”

Moore’s approach to financial planning, particularly during times of client transition, further exemplifies her commitment to making this profession accessible and significant.

“It’s really meeting [clients] where they are and walking with them step by step,” she says, discussing her strategy for helping clients navigate significant life changes such as the death of a spouse or divorce.

“What we’re finding is a lot of people are coming in feeling – I won't say helpless, but I find that the value that we’re offering them is walking with them, helping them build their confidence, helping them build the skill set so that they can feel really confident that they’re the ones driving their financial decisions.” 

As Moore looks to the future, she envisions a financial planning profession that is more accessible, inclusive, and supportive of its new entrants. Her Externship is a testament to this vision, providing a pathway for individuals to enter the profession with confidence and competence.

“It's really about empowering externs and walking with them,” she says.