FT Adviser speaks to Helen Longland, principal director of the Openwork Partnership's business school, about how to train the next generation of advisers and its plan for the future.
The Openwork Partnership launched its business school in 2022 for both established and aspiring advisers, as well as others working in the financial sector, who are interested in building their own business or growing their management careers.
The move came as a response to what the firm described as the industry’s need to increase its population of high quality financial advisers and business owners.
Last year in August, the Openwork Partnership appointed Helen Longland as principal director of the business school.
Longland, who was previously divisional director for learning and development at St James’s Place, told FT Adviser that for years Openwork has had a good reputation for technical training.
“What we found is there are pockets of learning and development around the business and Openwork saw the value of bringing all of that expertise into one Centre of Excellence,” she said.
“That's where the idea for the business school was born.”
When she joined the company, Longland found there was already a rich curriculum in place but also a developed skills offering as well.
However, she said: “Openwork is very new to digital learning and that's what we're looking at now in terms of how we integrate that to make sure that our learning is really scalable going into the future.
“It's also a question of how do we retain face to face and live contact with trainers and coaches because that's just so important in our business.
“It can't be 100 per cent digital, but we recognise that actually it is something that's really important.”
Longland explained that by being digital, training is more inclusive because not everybody can travel and people have different timings to abide by.
The Business School
Longland said the school has a number of different areas to it, such as the principal course that launched in July with approximately 41 people that started off in cohorts.
She said the firm expects to see similar numbers moving into the future, with the ambition to continue to grow talent and business.
“The biggest bit of feedback we've had is in the cohort field - so people actually working together on problems within their own businesses.
“People are able to be really open about the mindset that it takes to be a business owner.
“It's quite widely recognised that within financial services we have superbly trained and brilliant face to face advisers but what we haven't traditionally done is help people to grow and develop into being successful entrepreneurs, business owners, managers and leaders of businesses.”
Longland said across the industry, Openwork recognises this is where people are finding it valuable to spend time out of the business to think about 'how do I work on this business?'.
“What we've been doing is bringing people face to face to have those conversations and that time out and it's proving really valuable,” she said.
