The Congress included sessions on Leadership, Best Practice and Personal Development.

Technical education and self-development emerged as core professional development principles for financial planners at the Financial Planning Association’s (FPA) Inaugural Professionals Congress.

The event, which took place in Sydney on 17 and 18 October, welcomed over 1,000 financial planning professionals from around Australia.

The program was designed to develop planners from an educational and professional development perspective, based specifically on needs identified by FPA members. The Congress included sessions on the technical aspects of advice as well as on Leadership, Best Practice and Personal Development.

CEO of the FPA, Mark Rantall said, “Financial planning has undergone significant changes, in both a regulatory and cultural sense with the implementation of FoFA and a continuing emphasis on professionalism being a focus in recent times. Congress was an opportunity for the professional planning community to come together and celebrate our successes and the success of our peers as individual practitioners.

“Our goal was to provide delegates with a program that was, above all, practically beneficial to both their professional practices and their own personal development. We are engaging with delegates to receive structured feedback to ensure we continue to provide our community with the development it needs and the feedback we have received so far confirms that the Congress program met the needs of our community.”

Among the most popular and highly rated sessions were personal and professional development topics, such as personal time management and consumer targeted sales and marketing.

These evaluative conversations revealed that members benefited hugely from the event, with one delegate testifying that, “The Congress was a great way to connect with like-minded professionals and to really learn how to engage with clients and build a growing, sustainable business in this ever-changing industry.”

Social networking was also a focus at the Congress, with delegates encouraged to interact on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The event hashtag, #FPACongress, achieved the number one trend in Australia on Twitter with over 2,100 tweets posted before, during and after the event. The FPA Australia Facebook page had an audience increase of over 350%.

Mr Rantall said that the growing importance of social media as a professional communication tool was a key factor in providing delegates with social media support and expanding the online element of the Congress.

“Interaction between planners and clients is vital and with an increasing number of conversations happening online it is important that we are encouraging our members to use social media and ensuring they are equipped to do so.

“As a professional organization, we also understand that social media is an effective way for us to communicate with our communities and the wider financial services industry on an ongoing basis. We hope that the valuable conversations from Congress continue in the social sphere and we look forward to being a part of that.”

The 2014 Professionals Congress is scheduled to take place in Adelaide on the 20^th and 21^st of November next year.

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Things haven’t changed since the 1960s. The Sex Discrimination Act might have been enacted in 1984 but not a great deal had changed since then.

And smart, savvy women wanted to know how they could encourage change in their own businesses. On Wednesday FINSIA held a managing your career session for women in business and on Friday Sphinxx held its fourth Ascend day also focused on promoting women in business.

Why is it so difficult? Because men and women speak different languages in the workplace.

Financial services is dominated by men, and as a result, the business culture has adopted the male forms of communication. Women need to translate their communication to one that is easily understood by the male mind.

While it was agreed there was no need to emulate men – and discard their femininity there was a message that men do business in their way and women do it theirs but when most of the decision makers in management remain in male hands then women need to be aware of “playing the game” in the same way.

Top tips

• Be visible. Too often, women remain invisible in the organisation. Many focus on their work and getting the job done to the exclusion of promoting themselves and the contribution they are making to a business. This can easily be rectified by working a little less and promoting a little more. It’s the way men have been doing business for some time.
• Take risks. They were afraid of taking risks. Whether this was to do a new job in which there were aspects they had not taken before, or leaving a company when they were not receiving the promotions they believed they deserved. According to Sphinxx Ascend guest speaker and managing director of Cameron Ralph Lynn Ralph, we shouldn’t worry so much about what could go wrong because, chances are, they won’t.
• Ask for what you want. Women are largely not demanding pay rises and promotions the way their male counterparts are. Sphinxx principal Jen Dalitz said, we should approach what we want like children focused on the Christmas presents that they want. Be tenacious. Don’t stop asking.
• Focus on return on effort. Women do not pay enough attention to the ROE (return on effort) when they strive for perfection in their work. Is the extra 20 per cent worthwhile when 80 per cent was already working to achieve your work needs so you could spend the additional 20 per cent focused on other business goals – like having yourself move up the corporate ladder.

Australian business seen as macho

According to business coach and researcher Dr Margaret Byrne, anthropologists around the world are agreed that Australia is between 10-12 of the countries rated the most masculine in the world. Japan ranks top of the lists.

We can see this translated into business by the use of language that is used. It is often based on sporting analogies, such as “track record”, “runs on the board”, “let that one go through to the keeper” and many more. As women we do not make a contribution that other people listen to? How impactful are you in a meeting setting?

“You are judged more and more in that than other parts of the job where you work alone.”

“As women, we are not yet at the starting line. It’s not Denmark or Norway,” Byrne said.

“If you can’t deal with meetings in Australian workplace culture you will never make it past the top of the middle,” Byrne said.

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