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TRAINING IS ABOUT QUALITY NOT QUANTITY (Insurance Age - January 2008)

The introduction of FSA regulation appears to have had a strange effect on brokers' attitudes to training. With the incoming regulator clearly flagging training and competence as a key area of concern - John Tiner called it "a fundamental part of our regulatory regime" - many brokers decided they needed to do something - and fast!

In the final months leading up to January 15 2005, there was a flurry of activity, with virtually every insurance-specialist trainer booked up wall-to-wall. But brokers also needed to spend in other areas to get their houses in good regulatory order - and when issues such as client money, contract certainty and treating customers fairly (TCF) appeared to be higher on the FSA's list of priorities, spending on training rapidly dipped again.

The longer term effect has been that, with budgets stretched, but with an ongoing feeling that they need to be doing something, many brokers have settled for some kind of online training programme to cover most staff but moved away from the apparently more expensive face to face training. I will come back to the relative merits of e-learning and face to face, but in the meantime there are a couple of basic points to stress about why and how brokers should invest in training.

Whilst nobody in their right mind would argue that staying on the right side of the regulator is a bad reason for investing training - the real point of the exercise is surely to develop the capabilities of your staff, increase customer satisfaction and enhance the profitability and value of your business.

Training is not a simple commodity to be bought and sold by the yard. The real value of any investment in training is in direct proportion to the extent to which it reflects current and targeted skill levels. In other words, it's quality not quantity that counts. So any yardstick that records time spent - rather than knowledge acquired - should always be treated with a degree of caution.

Many firms waste money on training that is not directly relevant to their needs. Others miss out by neglecting to develop skills that could add real value to their businesses. Making the effort to identify training needs properly is as important as committing to training itself. Regular performance reviews, competency assessments and skills audits are an integral part of any effective training programme.

Time your staff spend being trained is time spent not earning money for the business. So you need to be confident the training in question is either addressing an area in which their competence is below the required level or where the skills they learn will make them more productive in future.

This may sound obvious, but commitment to training can all too often be more a question of going through the motions than of making a strategic investment in the future of the business. There's no point taking your staff away from their normal duties for training that is ineffective or inappropriate.

As with so many other things in life, you get what you pay for with training. For example, insurers' offers of free or heavily discounted training may or may not justify taking your staff away from their desks. The key consideration is who is doing the training. If it is an independent professional with the necessary technical knowledge and the training skills to impart it effectively, all well and good. But if it is the company's own staff, you might want to consider a) whether they will provide a balanced and unbiased view and b) whether they will necessarily have the training skills required to make the exercise worthwhile.

Likewise, the quality and scope of the various e-learning resources available to brokers differ significantly. So it is important to select a platform that gives you the tools and the learning resources (both in terms of technical insurance and of general business skills) to match your staff's learning needs with appropriate training provision - and to record, monitor and manage their progress.

I mentioned earlier that there is more to say about the respective merits of e-learning and face to face training. E-learning saves the expense and downtime involved in arranging training sessions for groups of employees whose needs may or may not be identical. The better insurance e-learning systems deliver bite-sized chunks on a user-defined (or training manager-defined) basis, enabling individuals to study at a pace that suits them anywhere they have Internet access.

There is no question that e-learning suits some people (self-motivated, self-sufficient and self-contained individuals in particular) very well. But it remains an essentially one-way or, at least, one-dimensional experience. The best face to face training, however, enables students to participate in a topic from a variety of different perspectives and thereby gain a richer (multi-dimensional) understanding.

A good trainer will use a number of different techniques to provide a thorough and rounded insight into a subject. One of the limitations of e-learning is that it tends to be ill suited to more complex or technical subjects. Whilst fine for introductory or intermediate level courses, e-learning tends to break down at the point where students need to learn how to exercise their judgement or apply their skills and competencies in complex real-life situations.

Where a particular training exercise is intended to provide a "feel" for a subject, rather than simply mastering a given set of facts or information, face to face is hugely more effective. As the skilled trainer leads a workshop through a series of expositions, demonstrations, interactions, discussions, debates, case studies and exercises, participants gain a massively richer understanding, which the trainer has the opportunity to test and refine there and then. Learning alongside colleagues allows participants to compare and discuss their impressions and so achieve a richer and more grounded understanding.

Logically, then, the best option is to combine e-learning and face to face to achieve a balanced and targeted high-quality training and competence programme for all employees. Blended training, as we have come to know this balanced approach, combines the best of both worlds: the economy and flexibility of e-learning with the interactivity and depth of face to face.


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