Staff Development at an Insurance Company: Training and Careers

Employee development is a two-way process. It depends both on the person and on the opportunities the company provides. Managers often assume that growth is the employee's own business. In the end, both sides lose: the specialist stagnates, and the company loses productivity and quality of client service. In insurance this is especially visible: products, policy wordings and regulatory requirements change constantly, and knowledge quickly becomes outdated.

The two most effective tools for staff development are corporate training and career planning. That is what this article is about.

Corporate training: two approaches

In-house training is a special form of adult education. It is built around the company's goals and corporate culture. Two approaches can be distinguished.

The expert approach

The programme is designed by an external consultant based on their knowledge and experience. The consultant runs a diagnosis, proposes the direction of change and acts as the bearer of ready-made expertise. Their decisions do not depend on the staff's opinion and rely on established market norms. The goal of such training is to transfer knowledge: typical problems, ways of solving them, requirements of the external environment.

The process approach

The solution is developed together with the team. The management team is the main driving force, and employees take part in shaping the programme. The goal here is broader than passing on knowledge: it is to build readiness for change and to master new forms of individual behaviour and teamwork.

What to do before launching a programme

A training system works only if the company has:

• analysed the current situation and the level of staff skills;
• defined the desired result and assessed the outlook;
• forecast the changes and prepared plans to implement them;
• set deadlines and a budget.

What insurance company staff should learn

Besides sales and service, an insurance specialist in Russia needs a solid legal foundation. This includes Chapter 48 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, Law No. 4015-1 "On the Organisation of Insurance Business in the Russian Federation", the laws on compulsory insurance lines (for example, Federal Law 40-FZ on OSAGO — compulsory motor third-party liability insurance), Law No. 123-FZ on the financial ombudsman and personal data protection requirements under Law 152-FZ. A separate block covers the basic standards for protecting the rights of insurance service recipients, which are binding on insurers, as well as the policy wordings for each product. Good practice is to give newcomers a working glossary of insurance terms and to analyse real typical situations, not just theory.

Career planning

The second path of development focuses on the employee's own prospects. A career is a sequence of a person's actions and decisions that affect their position in the professional environment. For a company, the internal career matters most. It can develop in several directions:

• vertical — promotion;
• horizontal — working in different departments at equivalent levels (for example, moving from claims handling to underwriting);
• centripetal — moving towards the core of the organisation, taking an ever greater part in decision-making.

John Holland's personality typology

Already at the hiring stage it is important to understand whether the field of work suits the person. Holland's typology is often used for this:

Usually one type dominates, but a person can combine strategies of two or three types. The closer the leading orientations are to each other, the easier it is to find suitable work. If they are far apart, choosing a career is harder. The typology helps avoid hiring mistakes that reduce productivity and damage the company's reputation.

Stages of professional development

A career stage does not always match the level of mastery: a person may hold a visible position yet remain a beginner in a new profession. So it is useful to distinguish the stages of a professional's development:

1. Optant — chooses a profession or is forced to change it.
2. Adept — has chosen a path and is learning the profession.
3. Adaptant — a young specialist getting used to real work, which always differs from studies.
4. Internal — an experienced employee who handles core tasks independently and reliably.
5. Master — solves both simple and the most difficult tasks.
6. Authority — a master known in the professional community.
7. Mentor — passes experience on to students and like-minded colleagues.

Objective career parameters

Promotion depends not only on education, qualifications and motivation, but also on how the organisation itself is structured:

• career peak — the highest position in the company;
• career length — the number of positions from the first to the peak;
• position level ratio — the ratio of the number of employees at the next level of the hierarchy to those at the current one;
• potential mobility — the ratio of vacancies at the next level to the number of employees at the current level over a given period.

Depending on these conditions, a career can be promising or a dead end. That is why a manager should, already at hiring, map out a possible path together with the candidate: the same career line may seem attractive to one person and dull to another.

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