Upskilling: Enhance your Onboarding with Online Learning

Upskilling: Enhance your Onboarding with Online Learning

Avatar photo Amy Simpson | October 30, 2020

If the insurance industry wants to promote an economic recovery that is not only successful, but also maintains the continued safety of its workforce, using upskilling to promote and expand employee’s digital capabilities needs to be an absolute priority. While upskilling should always be part of the onboarding process and continued education, current potential hazards and conditions have made online learning a source of knowledge no longer dependent on location. But it also comes with the risks of digitally overloading one’s workforce. 

Traditional modes of education have been shown to be largely ineffective when translated to a digital forum, but when applying a few basic concepts and methods, these upskilling programs will promote higher levels of engagement and retention.

Credentials Are Not Enough

Upskilling is part of any industry dealing with rapidly changing sets of circumstances. These days, I would have to say that is just about all of them. Simply achieving a certification in an area isn’t enough. Training programs must be consistently researched and updated to ensure the information a company is teaching employees is still relevant and applicable. Explaining the “why” of material is crucial to those employees identifying the importance of continued learning, applying that information and possessing the research tools to learn independently.

Collective Learning

Part of effective upskilling and successful online learning is getting a workforce involved in developing the knowledge they’ve gained into forms that are applicable to their position and their continued success. Collective learning, allowing those you are trying to upskill to be involved in determining the direction and methods within training programs, is incredibly useful when considering employees have to be able to absorb and digest information on their own time. We can’t be in class all the time, so promoting educational self-starters is a great way to apply the ideas of your team into the creation of a digital learning environment that is highly applicable and specially built for your unique company culture.

Feedback Driven Adjustment

When talking about upskilling or building a positive working environment, you have to listen and apply the feedback you get, or the needs of the workforce will outgrow your current offerings. Many within the insurance industry have been and could potentially be working remotely more often on a permanent basis. Balancing life and work already had its complications but now, in a less than traditional and at times less than ideal working environment, we have even more factors to consider. A three-hour training lecture simply isn’t practical or considerate. By creating shorter presentations of basic concepts your employees can absorb more easily, and offering them opportunities to discuss these concepts with their managers and peers, you will allow teams to form tighter bonds through discussion and also reinforce the concepts they’ve learned by making them an organic part of the culture. 

Upskilling and continued learning isn’t just a pandemic-era issue. Effective education will help any insurance provider develop their teams into an adaptable and agile resource designed to identify and deal with even the most novel and complicated obstacles. 



The James Allen Companies provides our clients with those leaders and team members capable of rapid learning and developing those upskilling strategies that promote engagement and cultural growth.

About the Author

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Amy Simpson
Amy has more than a decade of experience successfully recruiting experienced insurance professionals. Her extensive expertise and network of contacts has allowed her to place highly skilled and nearly impossible to find candidates in underwriting, claims, loss control, sales, premium audit, marketing, human resources, IT and beyond. She loves the challenge of looking for someone who seems impossible to find. Amy is committed to exceeding her clients’ expectations and enjoys helping people to enhance their careers. Amy has two young children, Noah and Jonah, with her husband Marc. They love to travel and look forward to planning their next visit to Disney World.
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