NextGen Planners, which is less than a year old as a company but has found increasing popularity, particularly among younger professionals, is developing its training scheme and will launch an academy in September.

This year the group is going to train well over 100 planners.

NextGen’s Adam Carolan FPFS told FP Today: “The three biggest fears that new financial planners tell us they have are, how will they get new clients, what will they do if they don’t know the answer in a meeting, and how do they deal with discussing their fees with clients.

“Our Foundation Training course looks to address these three areas as well as developing communication skills.

“We specifically built the existing Foundation Training on feedback from conversations with NextGen Planners. Planners and trainees were telling us that they wanted help on areas such as networking, building a personal brand, communicating well with clients/prospects which are all vital for the long-term success of the Next Generation Planner."

Mr Carolan, a director at Xentum, told FP Today: ““We are also starting to see a big demand from established planners now who want to really take their game to the next level and this is why we launched the academy.

“Demand is high and we have had to initiate waiting lists for some venues so it looks like demand will continue to grow in 2018.

“The best firms have always realised that Financial Planning is a people business and you must be good at the ‘people’ part to succeed but training for new entrants has not always reflected this with the focus on technical and compliance subjects.”

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— FP Today Magazine (@FPTodayMagazine) July 17, 2017