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Written by: John O’Connell | The Oasis Group
Let me be direct about where this industry stands.
Cerulli Associates estimates that 37% of financial advisors plan to retire within the next decade, representing approximately $10.4 trillion in AUM.1 The CFP Board reports that the average age of CFP professionals in the United States is 47.9, with fewer than 30% of certificants under the age of 40.2 The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects demand for personal financial advisors will grow 10% through 2034, much faster than the average for all occupations.3
Read those numbers as a system. A significant share of the current advisor population is retiring. Demand for the service is growing. The pipeline of new talent is not keeping pace. This is not a cycle. It is a structural imbalance, and every year you defer building a serious development program, your competitive position gets worse.
Most firms treat this as an HR problem. It is not. It is an operational design problem. The firms building durable talent pipelines are approaching it that way.
Your Internship Program Is Your Recruiting Strategy
If you are competing for experienced advisors on the open market, you are fishing in the same pond as every other firm, including the wirehouses. You are also paying for experience you did not develop, with loyalty you did not earn, and attrition risk you cannot predict.
The firms pulling ahead on next-gen talent have largely stopped competing in that market for entry-level roles. They have built university partnerships instead. They identify candidates in their junior and senior years, run structured 10-week summer programs with real project work, and convert the best of those interns to full-time hires.
The advantage smaller RIAs have here is real, and most are not fully using it. A six-person firm can give a summer intern genuine work: research that gets used, analysis that gets presented in team meetings, projects that make a real difference to the business. A wirehouse cannot. You cannot match the brand. You can match, and often exceed, the experience.
According to DeVoe and Company's 2025 RIA Talent and Growth Report, 68% of next-gen professionals want their firms to provide a well-defined career path, yet only 38% believe their firms actually offer one.4 If a candidate cannot leave your recruiting conversation with a clear picture of where they start, what they learn, and what the path forward looks like, you have already lost ground to the firm that can provide that picture.
The Program You Are Running Is an Apprenticeship. Name It That Way.
Many firms describe a development program that lasts three to five years, involves structured mentorship, moves candidates through multiple roles, and ends with them taking on clients. That is an apprenticeship. The reluctance to call it one stems from the word's association with the trades, which highly educated, credentialed candidates can experience as beneath them.
That framing deserves a push back. A union electrician signs up for a seven-year apprenticeship knowing the timeline, the milestones, and the pay trajectory at every step. Nobody is surprised at year three. Nobody does the math and concludes they have a higher ceiling somewhere else, because the ceiling at the end of the program is explicit from the start.
The reason early-career advisors leave at years three and four is almost always the same: they are hungry, they have done the math, and they have concluded their ceiling is higher elsewhere. In most cases that conclusion is not accurate. It is a perception problem created by the absence of a visible path.
The fix is not complicated. Write down what the path looks like. What does someone earn at each stage? What credentials do they need to advance? When do they get in front of clients? When does revenue share become available? What is the timeline to equity participation, if that is on offer? A one-page document that answers those questions is a recruiting asset. Most firms do not have one.
The gap is well documented. Only 38% of next-gen professionals believe their firm offers a defined career path, according to DeVoe, down from 50% just a year earlier.4 The firms that define it in writing are differentiated. The firms that leave it implicit are not.
Not Every Path Leads to a Book of Business
The assumption embedded in most advisor development programs is that all roads lead to building a client-facing practice. That assumption is wrong, and it is costing you people.
Some of the strongest people entering this industry are better suited to financial planning, operations, portfolio management, or technology than to client-facing sales. They have the technical excellence to contribute meaningfully, and they have no interest in asking for referrals. Forcing them onto an advisor track produces frustration. Losing them when they realize the fit is wrong produces a sunk cost.
Cerulli's research on rookie advisor development found that 84% of new advisors are drawn to the profession because they want to help others reach their financial goals, consistently ranking it above compensation as a career motivator.5 They want to do meaningful work. They do not necessarily want to do sales. Firms that build separate tracks for planning, operations, and technology report stronger retention among this cohort and tighter culture overall.
Personality and strengths assessments, DISC and CliftonStrengths being the most widely used in this industry, are useful here as directional tools. Use them at entry to inform early project assignments. Not as definitive sorting mechanisms, but as data points that help you place a new person correctly from the beginning and reduce the chance that you invest two years in someone headed toward a role they were never suited for.
Technology Is a Recruiting Signal Now
Younger candidates ask about your technology stack earlier in the recruiting conversation than any other candidate group. What they are really asking is whether your firm is investing in their success, or whether they are going to spend their most productive years working around tools that slow them down.
If you are using AI tools today, name them in the recruiting conversation and explain what they do for advisors on a daily basis. If you are evaluating, say so and describe the process. Silence on AI reads as a gap to a candidate who has been using these tools throughout their education.
The more durable version of this: give junior hires a role in your technology evaluation process. Create a standing forum where staff can propose new tools, build a business case, run a demo, and report findings back to the organization. Younger advisors are disproportionately interested in participating. It gives them ownership over something that matters to the firm, which is exactly what they said they wanted when you recruited them.
Succession and Development Are the Same Problem
If you have advisors who plan to transition out of the business in the next five to ten years, and most principals do, that timeline overlaps almost exactly with the development timeline for a junior advisor you hire today.
The firms building the most durable pipelines have connected these two problems deliberately. A junior advisor is paired with a senior advisor transitioning out over a defined horizon. The junior advisor shadows, gets introduced to clients gradually, earns trust, and is positioned to receive those relationships when the senior advisor steps back. The arrangement is explicit from the beginning of the junior advisor's tenure, not a surprise bonus that materializes someday.
This approach solves both problems at once. The junior advisor has a visible, concrete path to an actual book of business rather than a theoretical one. The firm has a succession solution that does not require finding a lateral hire with the right client fit or selling to an outside buyer who may not share the culture.
The structural imbalance in this industry between supply and demand is not going to resolve itself. The firms that build serious, structured development programs now will have a material advantage over the ones that keep treating next-gen talent as something to address later.
You have the runway to build this. The question is whether you will.
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Endnotes
1 Cerulli Associates. "40% of Advisory Assets Will Transition in 10 Years, According to Cerulli." Cerulli Associates, 13 June 2022, www.cerulli.com/press-releases/40-of-advisory-assets-will-transition-in-10-years-according-to-cerulli. Accessed 25 June 2026.
2 CFP Board. "CFP Professional Demographics." Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, June 2026, www.cfp.net/industry-insights/reports-and-statistics/professional-demographics. Accessed 25 June 2026.
3 United States, Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Personal Financial Advisors." Occupational Outlook Handbook, 28 Aug. 2025, www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/personal-financial-advisors.htm. Accessed 25 June 2026.
4 DeVoe and Company. 2025 RIA Talent and Growth Report. DeVoe and Company, 2025, www.devoeandcompany.com/talent-report-form-2025. Accessed 25 June 2026.
5 Shtyrkov, Marina. "New Financial Advisors Leave Industry at High Rate: Cerulli Report." Financial Planning, 28 June 2023, www.financial-planning.com/news/new-financial-advisors-leave-industry-at-high-rate-cerulli-report. Accessed 25 June 2026.