Even though ongoing training scores for the insurance firms surveyed in this year’s Insurance Advisors’ Report Card vary, most companies have one thing in common: advisors at all but one firm give ongoing training a higher importance score than its performance rating.

This means that, although advisors consider training an important part of their job, the majority of firms aren’t delivering up to the their advisors’ standards.

One specific problem is that rural agents don’t receive the same level of training as their urban counterparts. Although the majority of firms hold training sessions across Canada, most of them are held in large cities, making it difficult for advisors living far from those centres to attend.

“As a rural agent, I’m on the outside looking in,” says a Clarica Financial Services Inc. advisor in Central Canada. “I have to drive two hours there and two hours back, basically kill a whole workday for an hour-long session. It’s ludicrous.”

Some companies have tried to address this problem by offering advisors alternatives, such as conference calls and intranet-based training.

“One of the things advisors are looking for today are ways to limit the amount of time they spend out of their offices,” says Jim Wingrove, director of agency and sales support at Guelph, Ont.-based The Co-operators Group Ltd. “Time is money, and so we have tried hard to deliver more and more content — as much as we can — through our intranet and CD-ROM training. In fact, even the testing can be done online.”

Hub Financial Inc.‘s chief marketing officer and executive vice president, John Lutrin, says the firm is trying to offer more distance training because it has 3,000 agents across Canada: “A lot of training is physical, in main centres. But we also host a lot of conference call-type sessions, as well as a lot of intranet events in which advisors can follow along with the presentation.”

Many rural agents regularly use their firms’ intranet services to keep up with their training. “The training centre is three hours away, so I do a lot of online stuff,” says a Great-West Life Assurance Co. advisor in Central Canada.

Beyond the challenge of training rural advisors, most firms say they are upgrading their training on a continual basis.

“We’re constantly launching new training programs,” says Richard Williams, president of Vaughan, Ont.-based World Financial Group Inc., which scored the highest in training of all firms surveyed with a 9.2. “We’re doing a course on leveraged loans — borrowing to invest. We’ll be the first in Canada to do that. It’s an awesome concept, but there are a lot of risks involved, so we want our people to be certified.”

The majority of WFG’s advisors are very pleased with the training they receive from their firm.

“We get in-class training, we get field training, we get product provider training. It’s probably the best in the industry,” says a WFG advisor in British Columbia. “Because we have a lot of people who aren’t from this industry, we also have a mentoring program.”

Although few firms are launching major training programs this year, the majority are making small changes to their existing platforms.

“It’s always a work in progress,” says Nick Pszeniczny, senior vice president of London, Ont.-based Freedom 55 Financial. “We are always doing enhancements and tweaking the curriculum as we go.”

A few companies also base changes to their training programs on advisor feedback, which is often gathered through surveys. Hub has decided to be proactive for the upcoming Hub Day, an annual training conference that features keynote speakers.

“We hired a keynote speaker for Hub Day and had her interview five advisors to find out what they wanted to hear,” says Lutrin. “She can tailor her presentation toward what that her audience wants to learn about.”

The only firm at which advisors rated training performance higher than training importance was Toronto-based PPI Financial Group.

“We spend an extensive amount of time on training,” says Jim Burton, PPI’s chairman and CEO. “We do workshops weekly and monthly, nationally and regionally. We train in general education even when we are providing full support.”

That support includes tax, legal and marketing training. PPI conducts its training on evenings and weekends; it is completely voluntary and the advisors pay for it. It also holds invitation-only sessions for top producers.

@page_break@Why did PPI advisors rate training lower in importance? “I don’t need training,” says an advisor on the West Coast. “We have seminars that keep us up to date, but PPI has highly skilled people.”

But, across the industry, training has become increasingly important as technology plays a larger role in insurance advisors’ work. Firms need to improve their training continually and become more innovative in the training they offer. IE