Learnin'

I attended continuing education all day yesterday, which, if you’ve never been to insurance continuing education classes, let me tell you; they are brain draining enough on their own. The one yesterday included 2 hours of being lectured to by a weird looking guy about how we should be using social media to advertise our agency. I agree with this in principal, but first of all he said he doesn’t know how to use it, and that the solution is not to learn – it’s to hire a young person to do it for you. Because that’s going to happen. I can just see insurance agency owners running out to hire someone right out of college solely because they know how to use Facebook. Jeebus. He then allowed (and fostered) a discussion about how “young people don’t work hard.” Can I tell you how much I hate this generalization? Today’s young people work just as hard as any other generation of young people. They may work differently, and they may be in their first jobs at 22 instead of having 8 years of working under their belts, so they might need a little direction and help, but they aren’t inherently lazier than anyone else. And the implication in that statement is that people who aren’t “young” work hard all the time. Um, I’m sorry – no they don’t. I know just as many slackers over the age of 35 as I do under it. Of course I was one of 2 people in the room under 30, so that was fun awkward.

The rest of the actual class was fine – we talked about Equipment Breakdown coverage and Workers Compensation coverage (lesson of the day; don’t get hurt in California or Mississippi, or at least if you do make sure you are from another state).

However, over the lunch period they had a “box lunch” with a session on the new rules about Certificates of Insurance that the state has passed. Basically, the state passed a statute that says you can’t change the policy by writing anything on the certificate (proof of insurance), which was already technically the law, but it wasn’t spelled out very clearly. But companies requesting certificates don’t care what the law is or what the policy says; they only know that their lawyers told them they should get all this extra stuff on the certificate (long notices before the policy cancels, for instance). So they are asking for things that we can’t legally give them.

As you can imagine, this has caused a lot of questions from insurance agents. So they brought in this guy that helped get the bill passed to come talk about it. And he spent 15-20 minutes explaining EXACTLY how they went about getting the bill passed. Before he talked at all about what it meant (in fact, now that I think about it, he didn’t talk at ALL about what it meant). We have all see the School House Rock “I’m Just a Bill” thing, ok? We don’t need you to retell us. And then he finished up by telling a few jokes. Political jokes. The first one made fun of liberals (they all take other people’s money and just hand it to poor people instead of helping them help themselves). The second one was supposed to make fun of Republicans, but it didn’t really. I mean, on the surface maybe a little, but really it just said more bad things about Liberals (they teach their children to be biased against Republicans, they are stubborn and in the minority, they are only liberal because our parents are, etc). Of course he laughed and thought they were hysterical, but I wanted to raise my hand and remind him that not all insurance people are Republican, and I didn’t find either joke very funny. Also, maybe you should not tell a room full of people you do not know political jokes. Just a suggestion.

Oh, and after all that he sat and contradicted himself on what we are supposed to do about certificates. “Keep doing what you’ve been doing.” “Those people [that keep doing it the way we've been doing it] will get hung [the penalties for altering coverage on a cert include possibly losing your license and getting fined by the state].” “The state doesn’t really care right now about enforcing this law – they probably won’t worry about it for at least 6 months to a year.” Um…that was less than helpful. I was better off not listening to it at all. And I don’t think I was in the minority in that thought.

Anyway, that was the story of my day of continuing education. I did get my halloween shirt in the mail yesterday, though, and I got my haircut and I like it, so it wasn’t all bad.

Do you have to attend educational classes of some sort? Are they usually helpful or do you feel like you are wasting your time?