Delivering for our customers
Annual Report 2022
In this section, Gill White, our Chief Customer Officer, provides updates on the progress made by her team for members and customers in 2022.
CII Ambition for Learning & Assessment is:
We will create a simple and structured development pathway aligned to our professional map and each membership level for all insurance and personal finance professionals, helping them to “get in, get on and give back”. This approach will be supported by modern tools, learning resources, communities of peers, qualifications and CPD at every step of the member lifecycle, consistent with an exemplary professional body.
Our 2020 learning strategy was shared via the Shaping the Future Together consultation and using that feedback and inputs from members, clients, students, advisory groups and other stakeholders an iterated version was launched in our new five-year strategic plan.
The most salient aspect of the plans we shared was the Professional Map, which we refer to as the “golden thread” because it’s the standard for building capability and competency across our sectors and roles. Two frameworks were developed for personal finance and general insurance respectively – the idea being that you should be able to see your capability and experience within one of the bands of the Map, and then plan your development accordingly.
The Map was launched in September 2022 and we are now embedding it within our learning, qualification and membership solutions to ensure greater relevance of our proposition to professionals at every stage of their career. We are piloting consultancy services to help firms embed the Map within the employee lifecycle, and helping to align job roles, recruitment and skills development around the core competencies the sector needs to succeed.
Our hope is that firms will adopt the framework wholeheartedly, and if they do it will mean that they recruit using the competencies within it, and can use the diagnostics inherent within it to determine the learning needs for either their entire operation or discrete business units. As more of us adopt the framework as an international standard, over time our professions will have a consistency of language around capability and benchmarking will be available.
A further tool for building capability was introduced in April 2022 with the launch of FutureMe, a career development platform for insurance and financial planning professionals. The platform offers interactive tools and career skills e-learning, including more than 5,000 videos, 800 e-learning bites, 14 personality assessments and 300 soft business & IT skills courses. It can be accessed by all CII members, at no additional cost, via the learning section of the MyCII or MyPFS portals and is suitable for professionals at every stage of their career. We created the platform in response to feedback from members requesting more support on how to further their professional development and achieve their career ambitions.
We have also launched various new courses during the year in line with the needs of our members, most notably modules in cyber risk in insurance, product simplification, sales distribution, product design and Consumer Duty as well as relaunching various revision courses which have proved to be very popular. Two new MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – free online courses available to everyone – have also been made available: an introduction to personal finance; and, an introduction to home ownership and mortgages.
In addition, we have sought to enhance the experience for our students by offering a new-look, user-friendly RevisionMate product offering online access to a suite of support tools, designed to help our students consolidate their learning and increase their chances of exam or coursework success.
In addition, we have partnered with Coventry University so those who have already achieved their Advanced Diploma in Insurance can gain an MBA by taking and passing three modules, namely a leadership module, a strategic module and a dissertation. This option has been hugely popular with over 450 people having taken it up already – so much so, that we are exploring at least three other partnerships of this type with different universities.
In addition, there is a huge number of smaller projects that our team delivered in the year, such as:
- securing £1.2m from the Education and Training Trust charity (EATT) – an independent charitable entity within the CII Group – to fund career-partnering initiatives over the next five years
- signing up over 80 new business accounts
- delivering improved revenue at a reduced cost.
There is real momentum within the Customer directorate with a well-developed plan for 2023 including engaging with stakeholders to develop the new qualifications pathway with the Professional Map at its heart; the launch of a cohort-supported learning pilot; continuing to build or collaborate with partners to offer CPD to meet sector needs; and further development of the consultancy proposition for the Professional Map.