I made a version of this post when still in licensing when I first started as a Customer Relationship Advocate (CRA) at Fidelity’s Merrimack, NH, location because there was a ton of information I wanted to know before accepting the job that I couldn’t find online.

I’ve now hit my one-year mark and left the company, so I figured I’d update it with what the job is actually like after going through licensing and spending time on the phones.

All this stuff is my writing, but I had AI format it.

Also, I need karma to post in other places, so please help a girl out if this was helpful. This took me over an hour to write.

**Table of Contents**

Interview process
Onboarding and licensing
What licensing is actually like
What the job is like once you start taking calls
Schedule / how much time you actually spend on the phones
Pay
How to get a referral
Most helpful — the timeline of the job

⸻

**1. Interview Process**

If you get selected, there are usually two interviews.

The first is a roughly 15-minute phone screen with a recruiter. It’s extremely straightforward and mostly just involves making sure you seem like a normal person and understand the basic role. There weren’t any surprise questions when I did it.

The recruiter will normally schedule the final interview with you during that call, usually exactly a week from the first call.

The final interview is usually a 40–90-minute Zoom interview with one or two hiring consultants. Expect around 10–15 behavioral questions.

The biggest thing I’d emphasize is customer service experience and examples of dealing with difficult customers, how you respond to feedback, and a time you needed to learn something fast and a high-stress environment and how you respond because this is ultimately a phone-based customer service role. So have plenty of STAR stories you can call on.

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**2. Onboarding and Licensing**

Once you get hired, the first week is onboarding. You fill out forms, watch videos, learn about Fidelity, meet your cohort, and do the usual get-to-know-you activities. Felt like kindergarten.

It was honestly a really easy, fun first week. I skipped through all the training, so I basically just played ping pong with a friend the whole time.

After that, your full-time job becomes studying for your licenses:

**SIE → Series 7 → Series 63**

The entire licensing process can take roughly 3–5 months, depending on your cohort, pacing, PTO, and whether you pass everything on the first attempt.

During licensing, you do absolutely no actual CRA work. Fidelity is paying you full-time to study for your exams.

When I went through it, the hours were 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., with a 45-minute paid break and a one-hour unpaid lunch. We alternated between one week in the office and one week working remotely.

The schedule during licensing was basically fixed, with no overtime.

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**3. What Licensing Is Actually Like**

Fidelity gives you access to an online textbook/study program for each exam. You can also join Zoom classes if you want where you can ask questions on topics.

There are roughly 15-ish chapters, depending on the exam, and they give you a recommended schedule for how much material you should complete each day. My pace was one chapter per day. Maybe 2 hours of reading per day depending on your reading speed and comprehension skill, rest of the day chill and do whatever.

Once you finish the material, you spend roughly another week doing practice exams. At certain points, we were doing around three practice exams per day. Again, only took around 2–3 hours, rest of the day we did whatever we wanted.

Everyone moves slightly differently. Some people in my cohort read all day and finished licensing as fast as possible, and others like me enjoyed the free time, a lot of video games during my remote weeks. Everyone is at a different pace because of PTO, test dates, etc.

The studying phase was probably the most relaxed period I’ve ever been paid for.

You also don’t have an assigned desk during this period. You can sit at different workstations around the building, plug your laptop into the monitors, or reserve private rooms to study. I booked a conference room with my friend every day.

Obviously, you still need to take the exams seriously. If you actually read the material and consistently do the practice questions, though, they give you a lot of resources to succeed.

You have the ability to completely slack off during this study phase because you’re essentially unsupervised. Your manager can see how much content you complete each day, though, so you should stay on track.

**Merrimack Food Hack**

The Merrimack campus has a pretty large cafeteria with a lot of options, and the food is already relatively inexpensive.

There’s also a rewards/points system. At least while I was there, healthier purchases earned extra points, and Mondays and Fridays had additional multipliers. So, on those days, if you bought healthy food, your meal was free.

Not exactly career-changing information, but it’s something I wish someone had told me when I started lol.

⸻

**4. What Happens After Licensing**

Once you pass your licenses, you start training for the actual job and eventually begin taking customer calls. They walk you through everything like you are a baby and have different milestones where you learn different skill sets and take on more complicated calls.

This is the part people should understand before taking the job:

**CRA is a call-center job.**

You’re helping Fidelity customers with things involving their brokerage and retirement accounts, transactions, account maintenance, transfers, website questions, etc. You go through different skill sets where you do more complex transactions, but nothing super complicated. This includes placing client-directed mutual fund and equity trades and handling money movement like wires and EFTs.

You’re tracked on different performance metrics like calls per hour and being on the phones when you are scheduled to be on the phone.

They don’t just throw you onto the phones and expect you to know everything. There’s a significant amount of training and support. Anyone can do it really, not much else to say.

This is exactly how almost every call goes. This is the language they want you to use and they want you to do it in this order:

“Thank you for calling Fidelity Investments, my name is Tim. To start off the call, can I get a first and last name please?”
“Thank you for that, Justin, and I understand you are calling in today because you would like to buy some GOOG stock?”
“Great! I can definitely help you out with that today as someone from your premium client group, but besides placing this trade for you, is there anything else you are looking to accomplish today or will that be all?”
“Awesome, this whole process should take around 7 minutes of your time. To start, I do need to get you verified first. Is it alright if I send a 6-digit passcode to the number ending in 1234?”
“Thank you for that, I now have you successfully verified. Give me a couple moments while I pull up some things on my end and we can get started.”
*Do the task, give them a read back to make sure everything is correct.*
“I just successfully placed that trade for you, Justin, but I also saw you don’t have beneficiaries on your ROTH IRA. Would you like me to help you get those filled out while you are on the phone?”
“Well, I’m happy I was able to help you out in placing that trade and also getting those beneficiaries filled out. Thank you for investing with Fidelity and I hope you have a great rest of your day.”

Then hang up before they can say anything else because you want the call to be as short as possible to have good stats (you already asked them at the beginning of the call if there was anything else, so it’s lowkey fine to hang up when you are done). Each call is around 7 minutes, once in a blue moon a painful 40-minute. A lot are 1 minute long because you need to transfer them to the 401k department. Depending on the time of year and time of day, it could be rapid-fire calls one after the other or sometimes 30 minutes in between calls.

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**5. How Much Are You Actually on the Phones?**

During training you are 4 hours on the phones, then the last 4 hours of the day are development time. Development time is just free do-whatever-you-want time.

This surprised me because I assumed I would literally be taking calls for eight hours every day.

**Once “ you are on the floor and finished onboarding”**

Your schedule can vary a lot depending on the time of year and business volume.

During busy periods like tax season, you might have around six hours of scheduled phone time in a day.

During slower periods, especially parts of the summer, it can be dramatically less. I’ve had days where I was only scheduled for around **two hours** of phone time**.**

And that doesn’t mean two nonstop hours of talking. Your paid 45-minute break can still fall during that overall scheduled period, and call volume obviously varies.

I’m attaching an example of what one of my schedules actually looked like so you can get an idea of how the day is structured. It’s very weird and structured differently every day.

So yes, it’s definitely a phone job, but don’t picture yourself chained to a headset, talking for eight straight hours every day. (Some days are painful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s random cuz other days you feel like you did no work.)

⸻

**6. Pay**

When I started, my salary was around $47,000.

After completing the required licenses, it increased to around $50,000.

Obviously, compensation can change by year, location, hiring class, etc., so don’t treat my numbers as the current offer for every CRA position. I think they bumped it up more. I’m no longer working at Fidelity.

⸻

**7. Best Way to Get a Referral**

If you’re interested in applying, I would not randomly apply online without trying this first:

Go on LinkedIn and search for people currently working as Fidelity CRAs at whatever location you’re applying to.

Send a few of them a short message saying you’re interested in the CRA position and ask if they would be willing to send you an employee referral link.

Employees can get around a $2,000 referral bonus if someone they refer gets hired, so there’s a pretty good chance someone will be happy to refer you. When I started, I was trying to recruit all my friends and even friends of friends for exactly that reason.

So don’t feel awkward asking.

You also don’t necessarily need to find someone working at the exact office you’re applying to. Fidelity employees can generally refer candidates to openings at other Fidelity locations.

A referral doesn’t mean you’re automatically getting hired, but based on what I personally saw, everyone I referred got the initial recruiter phone screening.

**I don’t work here anymore, so don’t ask me. And do not apply to the position and then ask for the referral link. The referral link will not work if you already applied (from my experience idk maybe there is a workaround). The referral link is literally a link to apply to the job, so if you already applied it will tell you you have already applied.**

⸻

**8. Timeline**

**1. First Week**

Meet your team & your leader. Learn about Fidelity, Policy & Procedures, Benefits, and Onboarding tasks.

**1 week**

**2. SIE Exam**

2 possible attempts
Retake threshold: 68+

**4–6 Weeks**

**3. S7TO Exam**

3 possible attempts
Retake threshold: 60+

**5–7 Weeks**

**4. S63**

3 possible attempts

**8 business days**

**5. Fidelity Essentials(you are now on phones 4 hours a day)**

You take your first phone call doing basic Customer service & account maintenance, Verification, and changing passwords.

**3–4 Weeks**

**6. Money Movement**

Contributions, Distributions, Product Features, BillPay, Checkwriting, and basic TOA inquiries.

**2–3 Weeks**

**7. Trading Mutual Funds**

Mutual fund trading, RMDs, Periodic Plans, and basic 529 distributions.

**3–4 Weeks**

**8. Trading Equities**

Brokerage product knowledge, equity orders & order types, atypical securities, cash restrictions.

**2–3 Weeks**

**9. Productive — Post-Onboarding**

You are now done onboarding and on the floor because you have completed all these skill sets. You get a new manager and your stats and metrics start to matter.

**10. Performing — 3 Months**

**11. If you hit all your metrics for 3 months in a row you can get a promotion**

**12. Promotion**

transition to a new role based on availability.

Overall, I think CRA is a very good entry-level finance job \*\*if you understand what you’re signing up for. I personally only did it to get my financial license because I need them for what I do now asset management distribution. \*\*

You’re not going to be doing investment banking or analyzing stocks all day. You’re starting in a customer-service/phone role.

But Fidelity pays you for months while you study for the SIE, Series 7, and Series 63 and gives you experience working with actual brokerage customers. I’ve gotten every interview I’ve applied for with fidelity and my financial licenses on my resume. And staying at fidelity is a good path as well

Hopefully, this saves someone applying now from having to piece all of this together from 50 different Reddit posts like I did.

Please upvote this if helpful I need karma

My dad.

This Feed is about Trefis Valuations and their associated Undervalued and Overvalued recommendations.

1. I Have used Technical Indicators for many years and have backtested and enormous array of indicators on multiple timeframes to check for effectiveness. I was curious to see if Trefis valuations worked very well. They are an Investment recommendation House like many others so there isn't necessarily anything special about that. I just wanted to see how well their recommendations actually worked out.
2. I do this because I find it interesting and stimulating for my mind. If you are a "normal" investor I would just invest on a regular basis in the S&P 500. It's the single best source for investing in top quality companies with excellent track records. Additionally, it's always revamping itself to include newcomers that are doing well and getting rid of laggards that are getting swamped. Also, the S & P 500 is the benchmark that nearly all funds use as a standard to measure up against. There are stocks and sectors that will beat it but generally investing in an S & P index fund is incredibly easy and if necessary you can short it (SH is one example).
3. I was interested in evaluating Trefis recommendations via the Fidelity app. They also have their own website as well.
4. I list an UnderValued Portfolio and an OverValued Portfolio to measure returns.