Mr. Madigans department provides educational services for some 29,000 Hartford employees around the country. “We orchestrate specific training on behalf of the company. We also do degree-development programs, reimbursements and bonuses for professional designations.” He said that Hartford also offers tuition reimbursements for courses that meet business requirement.

And now, the company offers what it calls “Corporate University,” a Web-based depository of learning resources, classroom materials and white papers available on “every Hartford employees desktop around the country.”

“In our Corporate University, we have thousands of courses, and we constantly get feedback on the quality of these courses,” Mr. Madigan said.

He said that, at Hartford, up to 50 percent of training is now done online. “The percentage has increased from a couple of years ago. Before, there were more people stepping into classrooms. Now, more people are also learning through the Web, especially field employees,” he said.

According to a new report, many insurers are taking a similar approach, enhancing their training programs and adding more high-tech delivery systems.

In an exclusive preview of an upcoming study from the Society of Insurance Trainers and Educators, “one big finding is that despite the current economic times, most insurers have increased or maintained their training and educational budgets,” said Patricia McCarthy, president of the San Francisco-based group, which has some 600 members from insurance companies and educational-services vendors.

“We are finding that training personnel are very, very busy these days,” she said. The biggest challenge for training staff, according to the survey, is managing their increasing workloads, she said.

Ms. McCarthy said that in its survey of 62 insurers47 from the property-casualty sector26 carriers said their education budgets rose over the past couple of years and 20 said their budgets have dropped, while 16 said theirs have stayed the same.

“So budget increases are now outpacing budget decreases,” she said.

“In the past, training and education expenses have come under the knife,” noted Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute in New York. But now, he said, “its clear that for companies to restore and maintain profitability, all the heavy lifting has got to be done by quality underwriting and pricing,” which, he added, leads to insurers emphasis on effective employee training and education.

“When a company rolls out some new underwriting program or claims-adjusting program, it has to train its adjusters and underwriters so everyone can be on the same page,” Mr. Hartwig said.

Furthermore, p-c insurers are also continuing to show strong support for professional and continuing-education developments, reimbursing their workers for related classes and materials and offering bonuses, according to the Society of Insurance Trainers and Educators survey.

Ms. McCarthy, who also serves as director of training and education at Northbrook, Ill-based Allstate Insurance Company, said insurers showed their strongest support for the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter designation, followed by graduate degrees, and then Associate in Risk Management and Associate in Management designations.

One example of companies encouraging continuing education and professional designations is American Family Insurance Group, which has partnered with various local universities, including the University of Wisconsin, to hold evening classes at its Madison, Wis., headquarters for those studying for bachelors or graduate degrees among some 8,000 employees.

“Our education division is the central point where we make sure educational and training programs are developed and delivered,” said Ann Hamilton, vice president of education at American Family.

One significant trend that the survey revealed was the increasing use of high-tech systems to supplement traditional teaching in brick-and-mortar classrooms. Insurance companies, Ms. McCarthy said, are still relying heavily on traditional methods, such as in-class training, self-study and workbooks. But insurers are also using computers and CD-ROMs, as well as Internet and Intranet delivery systems, to help train their employees.

By incorporating such systems, insurers can deliver training materials online to workers prior to classroom meetings, allowing instructors to focus more on complex discussions, while condensing overall training time. This can cut down the class duration and administrative costs, and also eliminate travel expenses for field personnel.

Insurers are also using Web-conferencing and video-conferencing systems to reach out to their workers. Over half the companies surveyed reported using Web-conferencing for educational purposes, Ms. McCarthy said. “The usage has surged in the past couple of years.”

Training through video-to-desktop is also getting attention, she added. “That's still the newest technology. However, most companies' current infrastructures and bandwidth still can't support it. But it's going to increase substantially in the next few years.”

Stephen Anderson, the immediate past president of the Society of Insurance Trainers and Educators, also commented on the survey, saying that “there has definitely been more use of technology and Web-delivery recently.” He said classroom training wont go away any time soon, because individuals want one-on-one interaction with instructors

So what companies are doing is “supplementing classroom teaching with other high-tech delivery methods, in a really big way.”

Mr. Anderson added: “This is what they now call blended-learning. This is the big trend.”

The Society of Insurance Trainers and Educators survey also said companies continue to outsource at least part of their traininghiring vendors to develop and deliver programs and even teach courses. Overall, 50 insurers out of 62 surveyed said they outsource some training, with 16 companies outsourcing more, 21 insurers doing less, and 25 staying at the same level, compared to a couple of years ago.

“In the p-c industry, many companies consider methods they use for handling claims and underwriting practices to be proprietary, so they develop and use their own materials for those. That hasnt changed,” Ms. McCarthy said. She said that insurers feel more comfortable outsourcing training on general topics such as leadership skills and computer-skill developments.

A number of other carriers that spoke with National Underwriter said their education-and-training spending remains stable or even rising.

“I think we saw a lot of cutbacks a few years ago,” said Ralph Goode, claims senior vice president at Ohio Casualty Corporation in Fairfield, Ohio. “For us, there was a period in 2000 where we had some reduction in in-house training efforts. But since then, we have gradually built them back up,” Mr. Goode said.

“We certainly want to be judicious about how we use our expense dollars,” he said. “But whats been happening is the realization that we need to invest in our employees and their development.”

Mr. Goode said his company offers specific training programs for each of its business linesworkers compensation, property, auto and casualty claimsand more than half of the companys 2,700 employees use in-house training each year.

“A lot of trainings are developed internally, and we also encourage employees to get involved in college or graduate degrees, as well as professional-designation work,” he said.

Ohio Casualty is also taking a big step to incorporate the Web technology into its training programs. Beginning next year, the insurer will offer online training coursesaccessible from any office desktopthat all its employees will be required to take.

“The first course is an ethics training course. We are also currently developing several online training programs with different business units,” said Jo Majors, training manager at Ohio Casualty. When this mandatory Web-based training goes into effect in about a month, “online education will account for about half of all educational programs at Ohio Casualty,” Ms. Majors said.

“This is one way to economize. Web-based training can help deliver training in a cost-effective way and even reach remote users who work out of their homes,” she said.

Cincinnati Financial Corporation is another major insurer thats begun to actively utilize Web-based training. “We meet the needs of 3,600 associates in 31 states and also do some agent training for our 960-some independent agents,” said Mark DesJardins, director of education and training for the Fairfield, Ohio-based insurer.

He said there have been no cuts in the companys training programs, but his department has still been enjoying some cost reductions by using a “more blended approach to training, by adding Web-based programs.”

“When we use the Web-based training, it is typically more of a pre-requisite to coming into the classroom. Its not designed to eliminate the classroom, but to enhance it,” Mr. DesJardins said.

His company has been developing its own online materials and building its own Web-based content for the past year, he added. “It gave us an opportunity to reduce classroom time, reduce travel for field personnel and reduce expenses associated with them,” he said.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, December 5, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.