While fully acknowledging the Training and Competence (T&C) requirements that come with being a regulated and authorised business, and totally buy in to the need for this and just how important it is that we all keep fully up to date on all aspects of our market, I’ve never been a fan of training for training’s sake.
Over the years I’ve met a number of practitioners at their offices and found their walls plastered with certificates for various courses and qualifications that seemed utterly irrelevant to the client base they deal with.
Plus, sometimes these individuals appeared to spend all their time in either physical or online classrooms and have zero to very little social or soft skills to actually deal with customers and to provide them with the quality of service and positive outcomes they demand.
In my view, it is a very different thing to be paper-ready to give advice and to be a top adviser, particularly in a sector such as later life lending which relies so much on being personal, being empathetic, being emotionally intelligent and the like, and where trust and building a relationship is so vital
Now, as mentioned, I totally appreciate the need for ongoing training for advisers, and I’m a great advocate of lifetime learning. This is, after all, why we have the Air Academy totally focused on this, with nine specific, and relevant, modules covering everything from our industry, through the market and client, to products, the lending process, later life in a broader context, and most recently client vulnerability.
What you will have noticed from the above is how these modules are absolutely focused on, and tailored to, the later life space, and while a lot of these sessions will contain elements and learning which can be used by all types of advisers, we focus specifically on our sector.
The other important point to make here is how training, qualifications, CPD and accreditations dovetail with the job advisers are doing, the experience they are gaining each and every day, and the shifting sands of the market, its products, the choices it presents, and indeed how this all figures within the wide range of options available to individual clients.
In the past, we as sector practitioners might well have been too narrow in our focus –not necessarily looking at later life needs in the round.
Now, part of this, was due to the limited number of options available to older homeowners, but as this has grown, as we have seen, for example, the introduction of RIOs, or mainstream lenders offering more options for older homeowners, plus of course as equity release has itself evolved, and the very nature of being ‘older’ or ‘retired’ has shifted, we see a growing need to be a more holistic, later life adviser rather than merely an equity release one.
And, of course, this shift needs to be reflected in the training/CPD advisers access, the qualifications they focus on, and the ongoing learning that takes place. There’s no way you can advise in this sector today with a training mindset forged 20, or 10, or even five years ago, such has been the ongoing change in the sector.
Plus, we need to add into this the regulatory shift we have witnessed, the consumer attitude movement in terms of their property’s value and how they use it, plus of course the shifting needs and responsibilities that come with being an older customer.
There is much less of a safety net in place for older people now, and the expectation has to be that future generations will be asked to meet more responsibilities in their older age, be that long-term care, or indeed other areas such as how they might wish and want to support family members, particularly in difficult economic and financial times.
All this makes for a much wider training brief (and need) for advisers, which needs to be continually updated by us as training providers, but also needs to be regularly accessed by advisers.
It’s why we offer a bespoke e-learning platform within the Academy because we’re aware of time constraints, but we also want to ensure that advisers can assess the courses and training they need, at a time and place that’s convenient to them. If that’s first thing in the morning, or at home in the evening, so be it.
So, overall, not only do advisers have to continuously adapt to a changing market and consumer, but so does their attitude to training and qualifications, and behind that so does the content we provide in the form of the courses/modules, etc, they are accessing.
It should not be a tick-box exercise with the attitude of any training, any CPD will do, just to get the hours marked off, but it should genuinely support what you are doing, the customers you are advising, and the recommendations you are making. Don’t opt for a scatter-gun approach but tailer your T&C activity to your job/business, and you’re likely to get much more out of the experience.
Stuart Wilson is Chairman of Air Club
