After years of offering development and leadership training to its own employees, Kaufman Institute, an H.W. Kaufman Group company, has announced the launch of its educational and professional development learning hub, which will be available to all insurance professionals.
Content on the site ranges from live CE webinars and expert insurance series, to courses focused on business skills (such as agile project management and advancing in your career), sales, and leadership, alongside many other offerings.
Kaufman Institute has been a passion project for Alan Jay Kaufman, chairman, CEO, and president of H.W. Kaufman Group, who was committed to the professional development of his employees and ultimately wanted to provide those offerings to Kaufman clients.
“He really had that vision very early on in the process,” said Dr. Renee S. Lerche (pictured), president of the Kaufman Institute and corporate senior vice president of the H.W. Kaufman Group. “Over the years, we’ve built up Kaufman Institute and in 2018, it won a major global award [2018 BEST Award] from the Association for Talent Development.”
Kaufman Institute offers training capabilities that are especially useful for retail agents.
“Your local independent agency – and there are hundreds of thousands of them – their agents, their support staff, and their customer service reps don’t have access to anything like this. It’s large companies that do,” said Lerche. “The goal was to create something that could really influence the insurance industry, particularly at the retail agency level, where you’re having a lot of turnover now as people are aging out. It’s not an industry that’s very good at recruiting people or training them.”
She added that the breadth and depth of Kaufman Institute’s offerings on the learning hub, which was designed to be simple, relevant and easy to navigate, are available via a cost-effective membership.
“CE credits, webinars, personal and professional development skills, basic business skills, business etiquette, how to use Excel and Microsoft Office tools – all of that with a focus on insurance – that doesn’t exist anywhere, and to be able to offer that at a $149 membership a year is pretty incredible,” Lerche told Insurance Business.
The unique programs also allow insurance professionals to advance in their careers and stay on top of the evolving insurance, and technological, landscape.
“It’s a requirement to have the skills to do your job and to upgrade those skills so that people feel even more empowered and can grow in their roles, not just do them,” said Lerche, adding that outside of a need for improving technical skills, “There’s a real interest in topics like having difficult conversations, being able to make presentations, and getting along with co-workers. There’s a lot of attention on those kinds of skillsets, which before I think we thought of as soft skills, but now they’re real requirements of performing in a group.”
