Fall 2026 APFC® Coach Training Experience Pathway

Earn Experience Hours While Building Practical Coaching Skills

The Fall 2026 Experience Pathway provides a structured way to strengthen your client-centered coaching skills while completing experiential training, practice, mentoring, and applied coaching activities.

Participants move through the full APFC® training sequence, beginning with Financial Coaching Foundations and continuing through Deepen the Learning and Mentoring & Experience.

Activities completed through the pathway support documentation of 500 hours toward the CFP® Standard Pathway experience requirement.

Participants completing the pathway for documented experience may choose to pursue the Accredited Personal Finance Coach® certification by completing the additional certification requirements outlined below.

Enrollment deadline: August 31, 2026
All session times are in Pacific Time.

Course 1: Financial Coaching Foundations

Build essential coaching skills and explore how financial beliefs and barriers shape client behavior. Learn how to ask powerful questions and guide clients from awareness to action.

This intensive course is held virtually over 3.5 days on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Total Training Hours: 21

The Course Schedule

All session times are in Pacific Standard Time. Each of the first three sessions includes short breaks totaling one-hour.

Learning Experience and Completion

Throughout Financial Coaching Foundations, participants engage in live training, cohort discussion, practice activities, and growth work through the online learning portal.

Alongside training, participants complete readings, videos, assessments, knowledge checks, reflections, and applied exercises that reinforce financial coaching foundations, self-awareness, client-centered communication, discovery, action planning, and accountability. This work prepares participants to practice the concepts during the live sessions and apply them in their professional roles.

What to Expect in This Course

Session One: Foundations of Coaching, Financial Wellness, and Core Coaching Skills

Learn fundamental financial coaching principles and philosophies while discovering who you want to be as a financial professional through a lens of financial wellness. You’ll also begin practicing core coaching skills, including empathetic listening, curiosity, and effective exploration.

Session Two: Coaching Self-Awareness, Intuition, and Trauma-Responsive Financial Coaching

Explore the internal awareness, self-management, and intuition required for effective coaching. You’ll also examine the psychological factors behind financial decisions and learn how to approach coaching with empathy, emotional intelligence, and trauma-responsive awareness.

Session Three: ICF Standards, Coaching Agreements, and Discovery

Familiarize yourself with the ethical standards set by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and learn how to create clear agreements with clients. You’ll also explore discovery in coaching, including how to support values-aligned goals and meaningful client-centered direction.

Session Four: Action Planning, Accountability, and Engagement Lifecycle

Practice creating action plans that keep clients engaged and on track toward their goals while learning how to provide ongoing support as their life circumstances change.

Course 2: Deepen the Learning

Deepen your practice through advanced application, skill-building, reflection, and practice. Engage in role-play, case studies, and peer feedback to prepare for high-impact client relationships and real-world challenges.

The Course Schedule

All session times are in Pacific Standard Time. Each of full session includes short breaks totaling one-hour.

Learning Experience and Completion

To complete Deepen the Learning, participants engage in live training, applied practice, cohort discussion, and self-paced growth work through the online learning portal.

Alongside training, participants complete readings, recorded demonstrations, case analysis, assessments, reflections, and structured coaching exercises that strengthen their ability to apply coaching approaches, frameworks, ethical practices, and professional-development concepts.

What to Expect in This Course

Session Five: Ethical Practice and Coaching Mindset

Align with your vision, reinforce ethical practices, and develop a mindset that inspires positive change in your clients’ financial behaviors. 

Session Six: Co-creating the Coaching Relationship

Learn how to build trust with clients, set clear expectations, and create a safe space for productive, open dialogue throughout the engagement lifecycle. 

Session Seven: Effective Communication

Sharpen your listening skills and learn how to help clients clarify their values-based financial goals and aligned actions for progress. 

Session Eight: Cultivating Learning and Growth

Develop skills for facilitating client growth and helping clients integrate healthy financial habits into their lives, ensuring they continue to thrive long after your coaching sessions end. 

Session Nine: Case Study Application

Create your own case study and collaborate with your cohort peers to explore how you would handle different scenarios. This role-playing opportunity is a chance to bring in real-life challenges you’re facing with clients alongside the prepared case studies we provide for practice. 

Session Ten: Full Engagement Practice

Build on the skills you practiced in Session Nine by working in triads, rotating through roles as coach, coachee, and observer to immerse yourself in more coaching scenarios. This practice will strengthen your ability to apply coaching frameworks to complex situations and keep clients focused and motivated throughout the coaching process.

Session Eleven: Business Development

Refine your skills with additional rounds of full engagement practice and feedback from your triad peer group. You’ll also revisit your coaching vision, create a one-page business plan, and learn about essential business practices like budgeting, insurance options, and business protection, whether you want to build a solo, group, or team coaching practice. 

Session Twelve: Closing Activities & Graduation

Complete your Deepen the Learning training with a final round of triad peer group practice, reflection, integration, closing activities, and a graduation commencement to recognize completion of the course.

Course 3: Mentoring & Experience

Through a combination of one-on-one and group mentoring sessions, plus independent experience with real clients, participants reinforce their skills while building documented experience hours.

This course provides structured practice, observation, and feedback to help participants apply what they have learned, develop confidence in real client conversations, and demonstrate meaningful coaching experience.

Participants may also use the mentor coaching hours toward applicable certification, credentialing, or continuing professional development requirements.

1:1 Mentorship: 3 one-hour sessions

Group Mentorship: 7 total hours

Total Mentoring Hours: 10

The Course Schedule

All session times are in Pacific Standard Time.

Learning Experience and Completion

Outside of the scheduled mentor coaching sessions, participants will continue building experience through independent coaching practice, applied activities, and required experience tracking.

Alongside mentoring and independent practice, participants review coaching recordings, assess their use of coaching skills, reflect on feedback, document areas for growth, and update their professional-development plans.

What to Expect in This Course

1:1 Mentoring Sessions

Before each one-hour session with your Mentor Coach, you’ll submit a 20-30-minute audio recording of a coaching session. You’ll receive feedback on how effectively you apply client-centered coaching skills within the financial planning process and demonstrate the applicable CFP® Board Competency Standards, helping you identify strengths and areas for continued growth.

Group Mentoring Sessions

Attend a total of 7 hours of group mentorship to engage in peer-to-peer coaching practice. In each 30-minute demo, you’ll alternate as coach and coachee. Your Mentor Coach will observe and provide both verbal and written feedback to help you make adjustments to your approach.

Experience Tracking and Documentation

Participants are responsible for accurately tracking their completed coaching, training, mentoring, practice, and applied activities.

Upon completion of the required pathway components, Sage Financial Solutions will provide documentation of completed program activities and associated hours.

Participants are responsible for submitting their experience documentation to CFP® Board or any other organization reviewing their hours.

The program is approved to provide 500 CFP® experience hours; any other organization determines if submitted activities satisfy their requirements.

Interested in Earning the APFC® Certification?

The Experience Pathway can support different professional goals. Some participants are completing the pathway to build and document experience, while others may also choose to work toward the Accredited Personal Finance Coach® certification.

The questions below explain how certification fits into the pathway, what additional requirements apply, and what to consider when deciding whether certification is right for you.

Need More Flexibility with Registration Pricing?

If our equity pricing does not align with what is financially sustainable for you, select Financial Well-Being Rate when adding the course to your cart. You’ll be directed to a short form to request a rate that better fits your circumstances.