TD Ameritrade Endows Director of Financial Planning for Texas A&M

TD Ameritrade has a history of initiatives to help encourage the next generation of advisors. In addition to its emerging program grant, it also gives an established program a $50,000 grant and 10 students a $5,000 scholarship each year. And, now, Tom Nally told ThinkAdvisor, the TD Ameritrade Director of Financial Planning at Texas A&M  can help "lead the efforts for the school there."

"We're trying to encourage schools to focus on [the next generation] and give them a little bit of oil to grease the wheel, let's say," said Nally, who is president of TDAI.

Earlier this year, TD Ameritrade launched an industrywide internship program.

"As we talked to a lot of the younger folks that were joining the industry, especially our scholarship winners, what we found was they really love the idea of the [financial planning] space but they were really nervous about joining a smaller firm," Nally said. "They felt that they needed to go work for a big company because that would provide them with greater career opportunities, more learning experiences. We saw a gap there and we wanted to try and encourage students and advisors to get together early on in the educational process and become interns."

Rather than "fetching coffee and doing photocopies," as Nally said, "we wanted to make sure that they had a really robust learning experience that was beneficial to both parties."

TD Ameritrade provides advisors with an "A-Z roadmap" that includes information on where to find students, how much to pay them and a full curriculum, Nally said.

Healy added that more than 500 advisors were engaged with the program in some way – between guidebooks, webinars and a LinkedIn community created by TD Ameritrade.

— Check out 10 Job Skills Employers Want From College Grads on ThinkAdvisor.