With most financial services firms placing significant weight on experience during the recruitment process — and the traditional means of getting experience breaking down — women who have not previously worked in financial services are drawing on their skills and experiences gained in other careers in order to enter the financial services industry.

Before Judith Cane joined Canada Life Assurance Co. as an agent in 1992, she had held various jobs in “accounting, marketing and human resources.” But when her employer downsized the division in which she was working after she had been on the job for only a year, a friend’s brother, who was a sales manager at Canada Life, suggested she sign on with Canada Life as agent. “You’ll be good at this,” he assured her.

Cane was skeptical at first, put off mostly by the idea of becoming a “salesperson.” The long recruitment process changed her mind, however. In January 1992, Cane attended Canada Life’s sales congress in Toronto. Two things made impressions on her.

“There were thousands of agents there and I never had to line up to use the washroom,” Cane says. “There were not a lot of women.”

But what had a more lasting impression were the speakers at the conference — the top producers — who shared not only their secrets of self promotion but also their secrets for better serving clients, advising clients as well as preparing and protecting them for the future.

These presentations helped dispel Cane’s impression that she was going to have make the hard sell every time. So, she signed on. It was the social skills she had honed in her previous career — before she even contemplated a career in insurance or financial planning — that were infinitely more important than anything else she could have brought to the job.

Cane now runs her own firm in Ottawa, Antara Financial Group. Cane focuses exclusively on marketing herself to women. “I do have male clients,” she says. “Often a prospective client will want to bring her husband to our meetings.”

However, her seminars and workshops “are exclusively for women.” Along with finance seminars, Cane also runs events just to get women together, such as golfing or her own passion, quilting.

Like Cane, Bev Moir — now a senior investment advisor at ScotiaMcLeod Inc. in Toronto — started building her book of business 15 years ago from scratch. The former acute-care nurse and hospital administrator made the leap to financial services after 20 years in nursing. It was a case of sinking or swimming, says Moir.

“[The nervousness] just made me work harder,” she says. “Once I got my feet back under me, I realized how much my wealth of life experience served me.”

Moir thrived on the accountability and relationship with her clients that, in her previous career, she had envied of doctors with their patients. Ultimately, it was her ability to ask the difficult questions and “expose the tender spots” that made her a really good advisor. Although she “loved” the Canadian securities course, what she really took to was building trusting relationships.

Moir believes that she is better suited to the career she is in now than she was to nursing: “I discovered that I valued my independence over a steady paycheque.”

What sealed the deal, however, were the memories Moir had of her father. “He had passed up an opportunity to go it alone and it always irked him,” she remembers. She also recalls her father taking her little brother aside to check on their investments — and part of her wanted to prove that she could to it, too.

Both Cane and Moir admit they perceived math as a barrier to entering the financial services industry. But once they got started, this was no longer the case. “The technical skills can be taught,” says Cane. Moir recommends carrying a pocket calculator.

Real or perceived math skills never presented a barrier to Victoria Barclay, manager and analyst in Bank of Montreal’s risk management group in Toronto. Barclay has a doctorate in physical chemistry and had completed postdoctoral work under the supervision of Nobel laureate John C. Polanyi in 1993.

During the dot-com boom, Barclay made the switch from the academic world to corporate research, developing models and software. “It was a bucking bronco ride,” she remembers. But in 2001, Barclay not only had to deal with the volatility in the dot-com sector, she lost her infant daughter and her father.

@page_break@“I hit a wall,” she says. “Better a change than a rest. It was therapeutic to do something completely different.”

Barclay set her sights on the financial markets, despite having no experience. “I figured statistics would be my inroad; I had built computer models of light hitting the facets of salt crystals, which are actually much more complex than the markets.”

Previously, at her small but fast-growing software company, Barclay had learned to get complex points across to programmers and consumers alike. At BMO, it was this ability to explain complex matters in plain language that made up for her lack of industry knowledge.

Although Cane, Moir and Barclay have all been in the financial services industry for a while, Angie Karas of Markham, Ont., is now making the switch from a 25-year career as an information-technology professional into financial services. She is enrolled in Seneca College’s financial services practioner program.

“In high school, I had to choose between my two favourites — IT and accounting and finance,” she says, adding that she expects her experience, which ranges from programming to dealing with clients, will set her apart from other advisors.

However, despite being well suited to financial services, starting in the industry at a later point in life does mean that long work hours compete with family life. In 1995, Cane became the first Canada Life agent in the firm’s century-long history to get pregnant. “Three weeks after my son was born,” she says, “I was seeing clients.”

For Moir, a schedule of long hours kept her away from her son — and was also the final nail in the coffin for her failing marriage.

And when Barclay was studying for her first chartered financial analyst exam, she studied in 20-minute intervals “because that was as long as I could buy off a four year old.”

Moir sees four reasons why women don’t get into the industry: the long hours, the notion that it is male-dominated, the impression there is a lot of math and the fact “We’re in sales.” But those are also where the opportunities lie. IE