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CPD: Transforming a tick box exercise into creative learning – Marketwatch

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  • 08/09/2016
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Innovative mortgage intermediary firms are increasingly finding more creative ways to engage with their advisers to complete their Continuous Professional Development (CPD) logs.

All advisers must clock up 35 hours of professional development a year but often this can turn into a form-filling exercise for HR.

This week’s Marketwatch experts discuss their creative CPD strategies showing how professional learning can be meaningful, challenging and rewarding.

Maria Harris, director of mortgages at Atom Bank and Digital Mortgages by Atom Bank, says a combination of face-to-face training and digital distance learning provides winning results.

Clare Jupp, director of people development at Brightstar, says her firm gives credence to the CPD log by making it part of Brightstar’s Professional Development Programme and linking up to the Institute of Financial Services.

Dave Bedlow, head of learning and development, Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB), talks about a series of video interviews proving to be a big hit with advisers.

 

Maria HarrisMaria Harris is director of mortgages at Atom Bank

Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is a tick box exercise, right? I don’t think it is. For me, CPD is about being inspired and growing your business through an ever increasing pool of skills. The trick to making the learning meaningful is to make sure both the content and the way it’s delivered is engaging and motivating.

There’s so much experience within our industry, lenders and intermediaries, that providing a platform to learn from each other and being able to apply the learning to either our businesses or customers provides benefits to everyone. Whether it’s developing digital skills, or learning about our latest technology for helping customer conversations, gathering market insights or fraud prevention, I believe we have a role to play in supporting the development of our intermediaries so they can give an even better customer experience.

We love tech at Digital Mortgages, but we’re people first and if there’s a better way to learn then we’ll use it. There’s much to be championed from face-to-face training. When run well it provides the time and space to share ideas that are brought to life with attendees’ own experiences and the informal coffee breaks means learning goes on well after the event as you build your professional network.

But, as an app-only bank we love the opportunities that technology provides. When you’ve got a long way to travel to take part in venue-based training, an online alternative like a learning platform or even Skype, really stands out. Not only is it scalable, but done well can be as interactive as face-to-face learning with participants more willing to take part when freed from a room full of staring faces.

CPD can bring with it a highly motivated workforce who have skills the envy of your competitors. Now that’s more than a tick box exercise, isn’t it?

 

Clare Jupp Brightstar use thisClare Jupp is director of people development at Brightstar Financial Services

I personally feel that the key to success is to ensure that in the first instance there is a culture of people development within and throughout the entire organisation. Therefore, there will be ongoing, meaningful and useful activities taking place and opportunities for carefully planned professional development.

At Brightstar, in spite of the fact that not all of our consultants are currently giving regulated advice, therefore not subject to meeting the statutory FCA CPD requirements, we use this guideline as a model of good practice and we provide every business consultant with their own personal CPD and T&C log.

This log is sectioned into areas such as product knowledge, industry/sector changes and developments, professional reading, customer service, leading and supporting professional development for other colleagues, professional study and so forth.

To make the whole experience a meaningful and beneficial one, we have delivered support sessions to our team of consultants and have made their progress with and completion of the CPD log part of the Brightstar Training and Development Programme and year-end Professional Development Review meeting. These monitoring arrangements ensure that everyone is kept on track with regards to coverage and breadth of experience as well as giving ‘real’ value and credence to this process.

As a quality assurance measure, we have also linked up with the Institute of Financial Services (IFS). To this end, we have not only registered each of the consultants with the IFS so that they can access quality CPD activities, events and materials, but we will also be submitting our consultants’ CPD and T&C logs to the IFS at year-end so that members can be certificated to show that they have reached the required standard.

This is regarded as an important assessment strategy and management of their ‘fitness for purpose’, knowledge and experience.

If there is a culture of people development within your organisation, then you will find that consultants easily reach and surpass the 35-hour requirement.

 

Dave BedlowDave Bedlow is head of learning and development at Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB)

At Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB), we believe that learning never stops and that each adviser and business is different, when it comes to what they need to learn as well as how they learn.

Our learning initiatives are designed to improve the skills, knowledge and competence of our businesses and advisers and we work closely with our business owners to identify learning needs and develop programmes accordingly.

That way, learning is meaningful and attendees are learning by choice, rather than feeling forced to attend activities just to tick a box, which really is the key to delivering successful learning and development programmes.

The learning culture is established from day one with advisers attending our academy which is an opportunity for us to establish good practices and develop good personal relationships with our network.

After the academy and induction programme, our main developmental workshops cover protection, lead generation and leadership. We also provide bespoke programmes covering social media, buy to let and new build.

We deliver learning in a variety of forms, ranging from traditional stand-up workshops, to e-learning, video learning, peer-to-peer and social learning.

One of our most successful undertakings has been a series of video interviews with top performing advisers. We have deliberately chosen advisers from a variety of roles including estate agency advisers, sole traders, protection-only sellers, new-build advisers and telephone-based advisers.

We also selected from a wide variety of geographical areas to show large cities, less affluent areas and geographical nuances. These videos have been incredibly impactful in terms of showcasing best practice across our network and encouraging peer-to-peer learning.

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