Producer and Support Careers Overview: At the most macro level, jobs within the financial services industry fall into two very broad categories, producers and support. Within a given firm, the producer universe typically has the most lucrative compensation plans, the most prestige and the most political clout. As their names suggest, producers are viewed as the driving force within a financial services company, the people who generate the revenue and profits. Meanwhile, support personnel are viewed as having subsidiary roles, their utility, in the final analysis, being determined by how well they assist and enhance the efforts of producers.
Top Concerns for You: In evaluating a potential financial services employer, whatever your specific field of work might be, investigate the receptivity of its corporate culture to changes of career across the producer/support divide, in each direction. Prepare for the possibility that, in the future, your career goals and interests will be different. You should prefer maximum flexibility to make potentially radical shifts in direction. Moreover, making such a shift normally should be much easier within your current employer, where you have an established track record and hopefully also have cultivated the right internal contacts, than with an entirely new firm.
In some firms outside the financial services industry, producers actually are paid, on average, less than support staff. It thus pays to triangulate numbers from public financial reports to determine if this is indeed the case. If so, one should be especially wary of accepting a producer position at a company with such a reversed set of rewards.
Producer to Support: In general, it is much more common for a producer to transition into a support role, than for the opposite to occur. This is seen, for example, when a financial advisor gives up his or her client accounts and moves into a managerial or supervisory position.
Support to Producer: This tends to be the harder direction in which to move. Investment bankers and securities analysts, for example, typically start out young in the field, fresh from MBA programs or, increasingly less frequently, right out of undergraduate studies. On the other hand, new financial advisors are increasingly drawn from the ranks of seasoned support people in financial services.
Conclusion: In summary, it pays to have options. Anticipate that you may want to change your career path sometime in the future. In choosing an employer, make one of your key criteria its openness to such redirection, especially across the producer/support divide.
