Are You Still Learning, or Just Maintaining?
According to the Cambridge dictionary, a professional is “a person who has the type of job that needs a high level of education.” I suppose that’s why many in the insurance space try not to use that term to describe themselves, but I’d like to lobby that you should consider yourself a professional and do what professional people do, be a continual learner.
I’ve recently written about the trend around the US to remove pre-licensing education requirements or lowering the amount of pre-licensing training that is required. All that remains between a person and their life as an insurance agent is passing the test. As we watch the generation of experts moving on, taking their expertise with them, we need more people to become experts, not just licensed producers.
What’s the goal?
I’ve met a few young agents who got their licenses and think that’s it, all I have to do now is produce. But getting a license isn’t the goal. It’s a step along the way. I wonder what the public would think if we reduced the educational requirements in other fields that require licenses, or other certifications.
I, for one, am grateful that the cardiothoracic surgeon I recently dealt with actually went to a medical school, is board certified in his specialty, and that he’s a professor of surgery. I wouldn’t want to discuss the possibility of reducing the educational requirements for a surgeon who wants to work on people’s hearts.
I understand that these two things are not the same, however I would say that an insurance agent has the potential to be more than just the person who gathers someone’s information, feeds it into a comparative rater, and binds the cheapest policies possible. The agent can be a trusted companion in the risks of life and business. The insurance agent can be someone that clients work with for years, not just renewal by renewal.
The goal is to be that trusted advisor and guide along the way and that requires a continual commitment to learning and growth. It’s not enough to have a license. The license is how the door is opened into this path.
What’s the path?
Becoming a real professional in this industry takes an understanding of how knowledge works. You don’t just learn something today and remember it forever. You’re not an artificial intelligence. You have human intelligence and while humans can remember vast stores of information, just because you learned something ten years ago doesn’t mean that you remember it today.
I’ll prove it to you. Tell me all about Pythagorean’s theorem.
Right. Me, too. I remember that the square of the two sides of a right triangle that form the right angle added together equal the square of the side opposite the right angle (a2+b2=c2), but I don’t remember all of the details and it’s possible that I got it wrong, too. That’s just one thing you probably learned in high school that we don’t remember well.
That means that to be an actual insurance professional, you should be continually learning new things and working with the things that you already think you know. The things that you use every day become like muscle memory. They’re readily available to your mind and you can normally handle those questions easily. But there’s more to the insurance space than what you do daily.
No one specializes in everything and that’s not what we need to do. There are arguments for and against specializing and all I can tell you is that if you’re going to be a specialist, you’re going to need to become a student of the risks that you specialize in, even while they will change. If you’re not going to be a specialist, become the best generalist that you can. You should know enough to speak intelligently on a broad number of topics, but knowing what you don’t know is important here. It’s also important that, as a generalist, you continue to expose yourself to the things that you don’t know.
That may mean taking designation courses. It definitely means not taking the same stale CE classes that you’ve taken for the last ten years. It means looking for new classes. It means learning the things that some people want to avoid. It could also mean that while you stay a generalist, you can still learn something more than others know about a topic or two.
Whatever you do, you should become an expert in something.
What’s the point?
Ultimately, this is not about how much you know, or how many letters you collect after your name (I’m up to 24, but who’s counting?). It’s all about your clients. The person who gathers letters after their name for their own benefit is doing it to satisfy their own pride, not to learn how to better serve other people.
Go get some letters after your name but do it with the purpose of getting better at this career field. Whether you want to get a CPCU, a CIC, or some other set of letters, do so knowing why you’re getting them. These courses and designations provide great information, but that information must be useful for helping people to navigate their insurance purchases.
This isn’t to say that your learning can’t help you, too. It should. You should consider why you’re getting designations and what learning your doing in light of how they might help your career. Here’s a wild thought. The higher you progress in your career, the more people you can help. The producer who becomes a manager no only helps clients, but helps other producers to become better at their jobs and therefore helps more clients. The underwriter who becomes an executive has the opportunity to help teams of underwriters who all help insurance consumers.
That’s it. We keep learning not to stack accolades. We keep learning because there are people who need insurance in their life and we’re the ones who understand it and can explain it to them.