In response to continuing high levels of demand, we have scheduled a further session on 29 March at the CII’s Face to Face Training Centre on London’s Fenchurch Street.

Leading advisor to brokers Roger Flaxman and City lawyers Elborne Mitchell lead a highly interactive workshop outlining brokers’ duties and obligations in relation to Demands and Needs Statements, with specific reference to the Environcom judgement, highlighting both the challenges these create.

For further details or to book a place click here.

At just £110 per day – and with special discounts available – this course also provides outstanding value for money. For full details or to enroll recent starters on this unique introductory programme click here or call Searchlight on 01372 361177.

There’s a 20% discount on the normal price of £595 until the end of January, assuming places last that long. Searchlight’s 2012 Insurance Basics workshops run from 17-19 April and 9-11 October at the CII’s London face to face training centre.

The programme provides an intensive interactive grounding in everything from what motivates insurance sales to the workings of the FSA. including legal principles, distribution, underwriting, claims, policy structures and the role of market bodies.

For full details or to book places, click here or contact Searchlight on 01372 361177.

Looking for the perfect seasonal gift for your colleagues and staff? Have you thought about insurance training from Searchlight?

Click here to take the survey.

In 2007, the TIP began a comprehensive review of its training and competence responsibilities. This was as a result of the organisational development challenges associated with significant growth and the need to meet regulatory obligations imposed upon FSA authorised companies.

Searchlight Insurance Training was appointed to undertake a comprehensive analysis of training needs and to deliver a planned and structured programme of HR initiatives. This began in 2008 with a major corporate training needs analysis exercise, and the scoping of a project that would encompass all aspects of performance management, as well as additional HR initiatives.

The coming months saw the design and initial implementation of a tailored competency framework, crafted for TIP and supported by a bespoke job family, appraisal and recruitment and selection system. 2009 will see the first full roll out of the new process, following a pilot in the autumn of 2008.

At every stage, Searchlight has recognised TIP’s major priority to meet the aspirations of a highly successful and growing company whilst capturing the FSA’s T&C and SYSC requirements in every people management initiative. The focus has – and continues to be – the use of integrated and value for money initiatives that will assist the company in meeting its strategic objectives and provide longevity for years after completion of the project.

TIP Group Operations Director Mark Green said “Searchlight has assisted us significantly by delivering a combination of consultancy, support and industry expertise. Through the use of a committed partnership approach, we have designed and begun to roll out a programme of HR and people development initiatives which will underpin the future strategy and success of the company.”

Endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM), the programme is aimed at new and aspiring managers and delivered over a six-month period with course work exercises in between, leading to a widely recognised certificate.

The session dates are as follows:

• Understanding Management and Leadership, 12 June
• Building a High-Performing Team, 12 July
• Effective Time Management and Delegation, 12 September
• Managing Change in the Workplace, 12 October
• Coaching for Management Success, 12 November
• Bringing it Together/Presenting with Confidence, 12 Dec

The complete course costs £1065, which includes VAT and an endorsement fee of £65.

For further details or to book places call Searchlight on 01372 361177 or email brokeracademy@ssluk.net

Visit www.cii.co.uk/regionaltraining for more information on Broker Academy regional training.

This is certainly the case within the insurance industry, in which my own training company specialises. Insurance brokers, in particular have seen their margins and their market share squeezed by competition from direct insurers, comparison sites, high street retailers and supermarket chains. Meanwhile, ever tighter regulation is pushing up their operating costs. Insurance brokers simply can’t afford to waste money on ineffective training.

So how can brokers go about assessing their return on investment (ROI) from training? Whilst there is no single non-case-specific answer to this question, it is certainly true that strategies and techniques for evaluating training ROI have moved forward significantly over the past few decades. Companies need no longer start with a blank sheet when formulating an evaluative framework appropriate to any given training exercise.

A substantial literature has grown up around the topic of evaluating learning and development ROI, to which one of the seminal contributions was Jack Phillips’ 2002 work How to Measure Training Results, which takes forward the four-level learning evaluation model proposed by Donald Kirkpatrick in his influential 1994 work Evaluating Training Programs (though many of the ideas it contains were originally published by Kirkpatrick in technical journals as far back as the 50s and 60s).

Kirkpatrick’s book secured widespread business community acceptance for his four-level approach, which looked at 1. how students think and feel about the training they receive (reaction), 2. how training extends their knowledge and/or capabilities (learning), 3. the extent to which training alters how they act (behaviour), and 4. the net effect of this change on the business (results). To this widely adopted framework, Phillips subsequently added a fifth level focusing explicitly on ROI. His work is as influential as any in the field today.

The precise evaluative methodologies proposed by Phillips and the many other contributors to this field need not detain us here. Suffice to say that putting a value on training post-event, whilst inevitably an inexact science, is by no means the greatest challenge in the training process today.

Assessing training ROI after the fact is only one aspect – and by no means the most important aspect – of securing value for money from investment in training. Smaller firms, in particular, cannot afford to leave it until afterwards to find out whether or not they have been wasting their time and money.

My contention would be that the truly crucial role in getting value for money from training lies not with those responsible for planning the training, not with those who deliver it, nor with those on the receiving end. It is all about management decision making. Here is why:

Training is never just about training. It might sometimes appear so – as when regulatory stipulations require an organisation to undertake training on, for example, money laundering. But, even here, the simplistic idea that merely putting a certain number of people through a training course with a certain heading will tick all necessary boxes does not hold up. To pursue the money laundering example, if something does go wrong, the regulator is unlikely to view merely having done some training as being sufficient. The proper objective of the training is to minimise the possibility of money laundering taking place. If this has not been achieved, then the training has demonstrably failed.

That may be an extreme example, but the tendency to focus on levels one and two of Kirpatrick’s schemata (i.e. the input as opposed to the output end of the scale) rather than on level three and four (the business impact) is endemic in insurance and in many other branches of industry and commerce.

Maintaining a clear focus on desired outputs is absolutely critical to gaining value for money from any training exercise. Starting out with the right answer to the question ‘why are we doing this training’ is essential if an organisation is to avoid, providing the wrong training, training that will not have the desired effect, training directed at the wrong people, or even delivering training where training is not the answer to the business issue faced.

The last of these comes about all too often when line managers see their team underperforming and – rather than properly examine the nature of the problem and their own potential role in it – decide to throw some training at the issue. This has the twin benefits (to them, at least) of passing the problem over to the training function within the business and, thereafter, if the problem does not appear to be fixed, being able to ascribe its persistence to a training rather than a management failure.

Stage three in the Kirkpatrick/Phillips framework consistently receives too little attention. Considering how employees’ behaviour needs to change is absolutely critical to the effective use of training budgets. Theoretically extending employees knowledge or capabilities is of no value at all if this does not then translate into tangible changes in the way they perform in the workplace. Stepping back from the perspective of the training provider to that of the consultant, I would never hesitate to identify where, for example, flawed process rather than insufficient knowledge or competency stands in the way of business improvements.

Take anti-bribery training, for example. What is the central objective here – to heighten employees’ knowledge and understanding of the regulations that apply, or to prevent your organisation from contravening bribery legislation? Even the most cursory consideration of desired stage-three outcomes should make it abundantly clear that the latter is the priority, and yet many insurance organisations continue to put staff members through training that focuses purely on what the law says on bribery. Such theoretical knowledge is of no practical use if employees do not clearly understand company policy on what they can and cannot do in terms of corporate hospitality and the like.

Evaluating the ROI from any training programme requires agreeing a clear-cut project plan with proper management buy-in at the outset, agreeing how the training will be evaluated and what criteria will be measured before and after training delivery, and allowing for any other factors that could influence the data to be measured. Feedback and data can then be collected for each level in the Kirkpatrick model to assess what effect the training has had.

As noted above, this exercise is particularly critical to understanding what effect training has had at level three. This will typically involve tracking on-the-job performance and key performance indicators, as well as assessing performance against pre-agreed action plans. This will allow training supervisors and management to determine the extent to which training translates into altered behaviour and to validate whether the learning objectives were correctly identified in the first place.

Crucially, level three evaluation almost inevitably involves line management, forcing students’ immediate superiors to recognise their role and stake in the process and preventing them from passing the buck on to their team members or to the organisation’s training function. To cut what could easily become a much longer story short, far better to focus upfront on how behaviours need to change to bring about specific business objectives than waste time and money raking over the ashes of a misconceived training exercise.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2001 edition of T-C News magazine, the magazine for people development and people regulation personnel within the financial services www.t-cnews.com