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INSURANCE E-LEARNING IN PRACTICE - PART 2 (Post Magazine - Summer 2006)

Insurance e-learning has taken off in a big way recently. But those who imagined that simply signing their employees up en masse with an insurance-specific online learning system would be enough to satisfy the FSA's training and competence (T&C) requirements may be in for a rude awakening.

Experience suggests that a minority of companies manage their employees' use of e-learning well enough to extract its true value-for-money potential. Without adequate guidance and supervision some employees will tend to use the system quite a lot initially and then gradually lose focus and quite possibly stop studying altogether. Others may not use it at all. Companies who provide more structure and motivation fare much better.

Catherine Greenhalgh of JLT Corporate Risks supervises around 560 employees using one of the leading insurance learning systems which they have branded as JustLearnThis. "The T&C regime within JLT Corporate Risks is underpinned by JustLearnThis," Ms Greenhalgh says, "and is very much part and parcel of the training and development of staff. Each employee has an individual technical training programme, appropriate to their role, detailing the subjects they are required to study on a monthly basis. This can range from studying subjects such as the Data Protection Act to Professional Indemnity."

"After each insurance course, users are assessed via a multi-choice assessment and details of all the courses taken, test results, CPD hours/CII points are automatically stored in the system and any learning acquired from other sources can be added manually. Managers can access the full up-to-date records of any of their direct reports at any time, and apply a range of powerful reporting tools to help them monitor and direct training activities."

"Because we deal with a wide range of business classes," she continues, "from travel to caravan insurance, pets to property it is helpful to have access to a wide range of technical insurance courses and we can also supplement these with any bespoke material devised especially for us. We expect staff to study one subject per month, and if I look at the records and see they haven't registered themselves after 10 days or so then I will register them myself. However the interesting thing is that in practice most people actually seem to do more than they are asked to."

"You can achieve a lot with e-learning but it has its limitations," she continues. "There are some subjects I would prefer not to deliver in an e-learning environment, such as errors and omissions training for example. We very much take a blended approach, using face-to-face training wherever it is more appropriate."

Not all e-learning systems offer the same quality of content and functionality. Companies selecting an insurance e-learning provider should ask prospective suppliers some of the following questions. What qualifies your authors to write these materials? What is your authoring process (the better systems have multi-layer authoring procedures, whereby two or more technical experts will have worked on course content in addition to non-insurance authors with specific expertise in preparing effective e-learning materials)? How frequently are your learning materials reviewed and updated? What external recognition do you have (e.g. from the Financial Services Skills Council)? What is recorded - and how accessible are the results? It is also important to understand whether you are getting a true e-learning system or one that focuses primarily on assessment. Bear in mind too that it is the breadth and quality of learning resources that counts rather than flashy presentation and animated content.

Working proactively with a good e-learning system can help training managers achieve a huge amount for a relatively limited spend. Indeed, rather than seeing T&C as a cost imposed on firms by regulation, it is well worth remembering that a competent and well-trained staff can and<

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