Pros
This is a sales job, and you will be expected to sell, just like any other financial advisor job. That being said, I LIKE that you must produce a financial plan for every client so there is a context behind your product recommendations. Having a decent base salary is fantastic. I love my coworkers, some are now great friends. Contrary to other reviews, I've never had a problem with my direct managers. They're as hard working as the WMAs. TIAA's overall culture and values are wonderful. I still have hope for this place.
Cons
This job is not consistent across the country. Depending on regional upper management, this job can be a joy or your constant nightmare. The attitude of the person at the top rains down on everyone below them, so if you have a regional director that has a chip on their shoulder, is never satisfied and wants more, more, more, you will constantly be threatened with performance improvement plans (PIPs) for any possible thing you can imagine: lack of asset growth, bad attitude, low activity, etc., etc., etc. Our poor direct managers are reduced to puppets repeating the threatening messages from regional upper management, and forced to maintain spreadsheets of useless metrics on their WMAs. Work life balance is gone because quantity of meetings, quantity of notes, quantity of product discussions, is more important than quality. Oh, and operations is decades behind the rest of the industry. WMAs, who are supposed to focus on sales and being in front of clients, spend HOURS of our day checking and fixing the mistakes of support and operations staff that are inadequately trained and do not feel any accountability for their actions, partially because they are not made to feel part of the team. The client experience suffers as a result. I am embarrassed at least once a day.