Development of insurance company staff

Employee development is a two-way process that depends both on the individual and on the opportunities provided by the company's management. There are a great many paths for such development, but managers often neglect these opportunities, assuming that an employee's development is up to the employee. In that case it is not only the staff who lose out but also the company, which misses the chance to grow faster while raising productivity and the quality of work. Among the most effective ways to develop a company's employees are corporate training and career planning. These two paths are the subject of this article.

In-house training is a special form of organising adult learning. As a rule, it is designed with the company's specific features and corporate culture in mind. There are two approaches to building a training programme, which can be roughly divided into the expert approach and the process approach.

The expert approach involves building the training programme on the knowledge and experience of an invited consultant. The consultant's task is to carry out a diagnosis and work out a solution regarding the direction of change and staff development. The consultant acts as the holder of expert knowledge that can be applied to the specific situation in the organisation. As a rule, the consultant's decisions are independent of the staff and rely on the norms established in the insurance market.

Under the process approach, the consultant develops a solution while working with the company's staff. Creating and implementing a training programme requires the active participation of the company's management team, which is the main driving force behind the changes. As a rule, the staff are also expected to cooperate actively with the consultant and may take part in shaping the training programme. When discussing the specific objectives of in-house training, it is necessary to decide what goals the training programmes should achieve, and this depends on the type of consulting process to be implemented in the company. In the case of expert consulting, the training programme should probably equip participants with knowledge of the typical problems they may face in their professional work, the norms for solving them and the external environment. In other words, the goal is the transfer of knowledge. In the case of process consulting, in addition to a body of professional knowledge, participants should develop an orientation towards change, mastery of new forms of individual behaviour and the development of methods of group activity. In other words, the goal is not so much the transfer of knowledge as the formation of an orientation towards changing individual and group behaviour.

An in-house training system can be effective only if the current situation is analysed, the outlook is assessed, a picture of the desired future is formed, changes are forecast, change projects are prepared, and timelines and costs are determined.

The next path of staff development is career planning. This path is focused on the employee's future. A career is a sequence of an individual's deeds, actions and aspirations that affect his or her position in the business environment. To manage employees' careers effectively, it is important to consider the concept of an intra-organisational career, which relates to a person's movement up the career ladder within the organisation. This movement can take place in several directions:

• Vertical career – promotion to higher positions

• Horizontal career – working in various structural units of the same company at equivalent levels

• Centripetal career – moving towards the core of the organisation, its management centre, with ever greater participation in decision-making.

When hiring a person, it is important to understand how well the field of activity he or she will enter suits them. J. Holland's widely used personality typology is very well suited to assessing the personality and optimising the work of a new employee:

This typology helps avoid the typical mistakes of hiring people for whom a particular type of activity is not natural, which would undoubtedly reduce productivity or could even affect the company's image. Although under Holland's concept one of the types always dominates, a person can adapt to circumstances by using the strategies of two or more types.

The closer the dominant orientation and the second (third) orientation are (the sectors in the circle), the closer the personality types. Taking into account the content of the dominant and non-dominant orientations, one can choose the types of activity that are closer to the person and in which he or she will be more successful. If the dominant and the following orientations are far apart, choosing a career is more difficult.

A career stage (as a point on the time axis) is not always linked to a stage of professional development. A person who is at the advancement stage may not yet be a highly skilled professional in another profession. It is therefore important to distinguish between the career stage — a time period in personal development — and the phases of professional development — periods of mastering an activity.
According to the phases of professional development, the following are distinguished:

• optant (option phase). The person is concerned with choosing a profession or with a forced change of profession and makes this choice. There can be no exact chronological boundaries here, as with the other phases, since age-related characteristics are determined not only by physiological but also by multifaceted cultural conditions;

• adept (adept phase). This is a person who has already committed to a profession and is mastering it. Depending on the profession, this may be a process lasting many years or a very short one (for example, a simple briefing);

• adaptant (adaptation phase, when a young specialist gets used to the job). However well the training of a given professional is organised at an educational institution, it never fits production work “like a key in a lock”;

• internal (internal phase). An experienced worker who loves the job and can independently, ever more reliably and successfully perform the core professional functions, as recognised by co-workers and fellow professionals;

• master (ongoing mastery phase). The worker can solve both simple and the most difficult professional tasks, which perhaps not all colleagues can handle;

• authority (authority phase, which, like the mastery phase, also overlaps with the next one). A master of the craft who is already well known in professional circles or even beyond them (in the industry, in the country). Depending on the forms of staff certification accepted in the profession, he or she has certain high formal indicators of qualification;

• mentor (mentoring phase). A respected master of the craft in any profession “gathers around” like-minded people, those who adopt his or her experience, and students.

Promotion is determined not only by the employee's personal qualities (education, qualifications, attitude to work, system of internal motivation) but also by objective factors, in particular:

• the career peak — the highest position existing in the specific organisation under consideration;

• career length — the number of positions on the way from the first position held by the individual in the organisation to the peak;

• position level indicator — the ratio of the number of people employed at the next hierarchical level to the number of people employed at the hierarchical level where the individual is at the given point in his or her career;

• potential mobility indicator — the ratio (over a certain period of time) of the number of vacancies at the next hierarchical level to the number of people employed at the hierarchical level where the individual is.

Depending on objective conditions, an intra-organisational career may be promising or a dead end — an employee may have either a long career line or a very short one. When hiring a candidate, the HR manager should already design a possible career and discuss it with the candidate based on his or her individual characteristics and specific motivation. The same career line may be attractive to some employees and uninteresting to others, which will significantly affect the effectiveness of their further work.