Even prior to regulation, mortgage advisers and IFAs have been expected to continually improve their skills, not only in terms of continuing professional development (CPD) but also to maintain a competitive advantage. Statutory regulation has certainly raised the pressure on training both for systems and process. However, there are many times when it’s not only statutory requirements that make you look for learning solutions. As we all strive to improve our productivity, to achieve more and earn more in less time, we often need to improve our skills to achieve it. This is particularly the case when using new technology. The problem is one of time and cost. The solution is training courses, but these can be expensive in both terms of time and money. Even free courses can be very costly if the adviser takes into account the opportunity cost of taking a day out for a seminar when that time could be spent meeting clients. Travelling to a training venue is one example of time wasted.
Technological advancement
It would certainly be so much easier if you could have training in the areas that you want, when you want it, avoiding the need to take a full day out of the office. This dream has actually started to become a reality thanks to new technological developments, which has led to firms now able to offer online training and advancements in standard PC hardware. Online training, as the name suggests, facilitates the ability to access the training session from your own computer. This new technology can even offer an environment to be shared with colleagues so you can all see the same information, at the same time, from your individual computers. In addition, the training experience can be more targeted and specific. You can now select a training session not just about a particular program or system but a session dedicated to a specific element that is of interest. This removes the need to sit through hours of general information just to get to that one nugget of information you’re after.
As the online training is done in real-time with a presenter on the other end of the phone line, you continue to receive the benefits of face-to-face training but without the travelling time or cost. You are able to view live demonstrations in real-time and receive training with colleagues, just as you would in a classroom situation – only now, you and your colleagues do not need to be sitting in the same room as the trainer, or even the same room as each other. All participants can be in training together despite being in different offices around the UK. If it’s your employees who need training, online training can benefit your business by reducing the cost to you of their training while ensuring their skill set remains high. You will also benefit by having your employees in the office and knowing they are contactable, rather than losing them for the day.
Additional benefits
The technology that enables online training can also benefit you and your business in other ways by enabling you to have online meetings with colleagues in different offices, or with clients who can’t come to your office. It also enables you to collaborate on documents with different people by allowing them to view any application running on your PC in real-time.
Those suppliers in the mortgage industry at the forefront of cutting-edge technology have already started to adopt online seminars as a way to give you the information you need. We have just introduced online seminars into our training package and we have received tremendous feedback about the online training modules, which demonstrate how the system works and how to get the most out of it. As the use of this technology broadens, intermediaries will be able to pick and choose the modules that they want to study in order to meet their particular requirements and those of their business. Of course, as with all good systems, you will still have access to a support centre with real people at the other end to help you with any additional queries you have or with anything you don’t understand.
Online seminars are not the panacea for all training requirements as there will inevitably be times when you would prefer to be in the same room with other people, bouncing ideas off one another. However, online training does have its place, giving you a wealth of information and putting you in control of when and where you access it. And anything that helps to make your life easier, giving you the skills you need with less cost and inconvenience has to be a good thing.
