Best Practices For Running A Financial Planning Internship Program (And Creating A More Productive Outlook)

Traditionally, financial planning internship programs have offered students who are aspiring financial planners a way to prepare for entering the workforce by gaining real-world experience in advisory firm settings (as well as a way to get their foot in the door with prospective employers). But when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, many firms shut their offices and went fully remote, which forced them to either rapidly reconfigure their internship programs or – as was more commonly the case – to suspend their internships or end them entirely.

Recognizing the potential impact that a lack of internships for a generation of planners could have on the industry, in 2020 the Financial Planning Association (FPA) launched “The Externship”, a virtual program that provided participants with access to mentorships with financial planning practitioners, technology commonly used in financial planning, and the opportunity to apply hours from the program towards the experience requirement for CFP certification. And while the original vision for The Externship was to provide a 1-year stopgap solution for a few hundred attendees, ultimately over a thousand students signed up in 2020 – because as it turned out, the virtual structure of The Externship opened up opportunities to participate not only for students whose internship opportunities had been disrupted by the pandemic, but also for those who (due to working, caretaking, and other commitments) would have never had the ability to participate in a traditional internship in the first place!

In this Guest Post, Hannah Moore, the creator of The Externship, offers her perspective on how lessons learned from The Externship (which is now entering its 4th year) can inform advisory firm leaders on how they structure and implement their own internship programs to create potentially better outcomes for interns, employees, the firms themselves, and the industry as a whole.

In the wake of the pandemic, many advisory firms have adopted a ‘new normal’ of either hybrid or fully-remote work, providing an opportunity for them to rethink how they conduct their internship programs. While adopting a ‘business-as-usual’ mindset towards internships makes little sense when business as usual has changed so dramatically since 2020, the success and growing popularity of The Externship has suggested that even before the pandemic, the traditional internship model wasn’t working as well as it could have, either for interns or the firms they worked for.

For interns, a good internship can increase the chances of getting a job offer, from either the firm that they interned with or other firms who value the experience that the intern received from the program. But firms benefit as well, with the opportunity to thoroughly vet and observe potential employees and to showcase themselves to prospective talent. And there are even advantages for the firm’s existing employees who mentor the interns: the opportunity to train, teach, and manage interns can provide valuable leadership experience to benefit their own career development.

Ultimately, the key point is that today’s interns – whether they participate in industrywide programs like The Externship or in internships at the individual firm level – represent future generations of leaders in the financial planning industry. The ways that firms implement their financial planning internship programs not only influence the financial planning philosophies and practices that interns develop throughout their careers, but can also impact how diverse and equitable the profession will be in the future. Which means that internships play an instrumental role in moving the profession forward, and by creating internships that are better, more intentional, and more accessible, firms can make for a more productive outlook not just for the benefit of their own businesses and employees, but also for students and the industry at large!

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