Insurance Times Awards 2022 - Developing hard and soft professional skills is ‘crucial’ - Allianz

Explain briefly about your entry in the Excellence in Professional Development category.

The insurance profession’s war for talent - often with other sectors - can be brutal.

The Allianz Partners Academy offers brokers support to fight that battle through enabling the development of their own people. Professional development across hard and soft skills is crucial to supporting our mutual customers and delivering excellent service.

Each broker is unique. That’s why the academy gives brokers the flexibility to pick a format, topic and time commitment that best matches their needs.

All aspects of the academy are highly relevant and adapt to the ever-evolving risks and challenges that brokers face. For example, last year’s most popular webinars dealt with the whiplash reforms and underinsurance.

What do you think makes your entry stand out or different from your competition?

Our ethos for broker training is to sharpen expertise, together.

Not only do we champion our employees’ development to better support brokers through local relationships, but we also invest heavily in brokers themselves.

We’re also making significant contributions to brokers’ professional development by funding apprenticeships. Uniquely our programme covers the three key apprenticeship levels for the insurance profession that are linked to the Chartered Insurance Institute:

• Level Three Certificate in Insurance.
• Level Four Diploma in Insurance.
• Level Six Advanced Diploma in Insurance.

Plus, we’re championing mental health through broker mental health first aider qualifications.

What would winning this award mean to you and your firm?

It would be a wonderful recognition of our commitment to sharing expertise with our brokers to help drive the industry forward.

We’d hope it would also encourage more brokers to benefit from the learning and development opportunities Allianz provides.