Steve Grasso remembers when he first met Jennifer Chasse, program manager at the Executive Development Center at Bryant University.
It was 2001, and Grasso, in the midst of a career change, had enrolled in the center’s Certified Financial Planner program, six grueling courses that can take more than 1 1/2 years to complete, punctuated with an exam that historically has a 50 percent pass rate.
Somehow, Grasso said, Chasse eased his worries.
“She projected this aura that she was going to be there with you every step of the way,” recalls Grasso, now the past chairman and past president of the Financial Planners Association of Rhode Island. “She made you feel like you were going to go through it together.”
Over the last decade that Chasse has been overseeing the CFP program at Bryant, she has shepherded hundreds of people through the program and beyond, sharing studying tips, helping prepare students’ resumes and getting job interviews for students, many of them older career changers.
For that help, she’s received stacks of thank-you cards, vases full of flowers and even a team jersey from a former professional soccer player who went through the program.
“My position allows me to enjoy the success of other people’s careers,” she said. “It’s a great line of work to be in.”
That might seem strange considering that Chasse’s background is in adult education and that she leaves her personal money matters up to her own financial planner. She had previously worked at the Northern Rhode Island Private Industry Council, helping companies to identify their job-training needs and finding funding for them.
But since she was hired to launch the CFP program in 1999, Chasse has become a force in the financial-planning industry.
Before the program got its start at Bryant, people either had to drive to Boston to take the demanding courses that begin the process of becoming a certified financial planner or enroll in a self-study program. Few in Rhode Island did it.
When Chasse arrived at the Executive Development Center, her early attempts at marketing the CFP program amounted to carrying brochures and fliers to offices of local financial firms to get the word out.
Now the program’s reputation has grown to the point that some financial companies such as UBS and Fidelity request that the center hold courses at company offices as far away as Maryland and South Carolina.
She’s not satisfied. Chasse notes that there about 10,000 people working in the financial- services sector in Rhode Island. Only 298 are CFPs, and about half of those have gone through the program at Bryant.
In the meantime, she continues to work with people taking the CFP program, from giving a primer on textbook reading to connecting CFP candidates with job opportunities. She also coaches the instructors, many of whom are planners with little background in teaching.
“I try to give people the same level of service I would like,” Chasse says. •
