The financial advice profession’s diversity problem runs deeper than a simple pipeline shortage, Hayley Rabbets, head of evergreen at Calton, told delegates at MMI London 2026 on 6 October. Speaking from her own experience, Rabbets argued that structural barriers, not a lack of willing candidates, are the central obstacle to building a sustainable advisory workforce.
Rabbets began with her own entry into the profession: she found a role as a receptionist at an advice firm after scanning local newspaper job listings. She had no relevant experience, but the firm gave her a chance. ‘I was lucky they opened that door,’ she said, acknowledging that she subsequently gave the firm the first six years of her career. That willingness to hire on potential rather than credentials, she suggested, is far less common than it should be.
The Case for Rethinking How Firms Hire
The practical barriers Rabbets identified are familiar to anyone who has tried to recruit in a small advice firm: training takes time, resources are limited, and the compliance environment demands competence from day one. But she pushed back on the conclusion that cautious hiring is therefore justified. ‘It’s about giving people chances, pausing before writing that job ad and asking yourself if they need years of experience or can they learn on the job,’ she said.
For firms that cannot stretch to a full-time hire, Rabbets suggested reduced hours or structured mentorship as routes to bringing in new talent without immediately absorbing the full cost. She noted that she mentors regularly herself, focusing on goal-setting and mapping out practical steps with each individual. Building a professional community through industry events, she added, is often where careers begin in earnest.
The objection over training time is real, she conceded, particularly for smaller practices. Her counter is experiential: in her view, new entrants typically ‘offer a fresh pair of eyes on issues you can no longer see yourself.’ Over a medium-to-long horizon, that perspective can translate into genuine operational value. For portfolio-minded readers, the analogy is not a stretch: the cost of entry is a short-term drag on a long-term holding.
Financial Advice Profession Diversity: The Regulator’s Numbers Tell a Clear Story
Rabbets drew on figures from the Financial Conduct Authority to frame the urgency. The average adviser age sits in the late 40s, and fewer than 5% of advisers are under 30. Only 18% of advisers are women, a figure she described as evidence that the profession needs ‘diverse blood, not just new or young.’ That distinction matters: recruiting younger candidates alone would leave the gender imbalance unaddressed.
Broader data adds context to the UK picture. According to AdvizorPro‘s analysis of more than one million advisor records and nearly 800,000 currently registered individuals, women represent approximately 26% of practising financial advisors with known gender globally, a proportion that remains well below parity. Separately, Randall Wealth Group puts the average financial advisor age at 44, which, read alongside the FCA’s late-40s figure for the UK, suggests the age concentration is consistent across markets. The profession is ageing in parallel on both sides of the Atlantic.
For advisers managing their own succession planning, or for clients who wonder whether their adviser’s firm will still exist in a decade, these figures represent a structural risk worth examining. A profession that cannot attract women, career changers, or candidates without a pre-existing financial background is narrowing its own talent pool at precisely the moment demographic attrition is thinning it from the other end.
Rabbets’ central argument is that financial advice profession diversity is not a values exercise separate from business strategy: it is business strategy. Clients, she noted, are more likely to engage actively when they can recognise themselves within the profession. Firms that make it easier to join are, in effect, investing in client relationships that have not yet been formed.
