Lessons Learned from a Professional Development… Professional

By Alaina Faiello

s I was standing in line waiting to pick up my order, the lady standing next to me began to make small talk. After going through the normal introductory questions, she asked me, “So, what do you do for work?” To which I replied, “I work for a national association that advocates for the profession of insurance and financial advisors, and I manage their Professional Development department!” After she blinked at me a few times and then proceeded to stare at me blankly, I corrected my response and said, “I educate people, ma’am.”

In the vast world that is education, the term “professional development” may be used to describe a wide variety of specialized training, formal education or advanced professional learning intended to help individuals improve their professional knowledge, competence, skill and effectiveness. The world of professional development has spanned across industries and cultures as far back in history as the first cavemen learning how to make fire and going on to teach others how to do the same in a little cave-class lesson.

NAIFA has had a similar history in providing professional development for our members and the industry at both the national and chapter levels, albeit much advanced from caveman days! Our members and industry experts took the things they knew and shared those things with others to teach them how they too could be successful. In this article, I will share three easy lessons

I have learned on building effective programming and wrap it up with a bow by sharing the future of NAIFA’s professional development.

Ways To Be Successful

Lesson #1: “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Your target audience.”

In professional development, you need to decide early on who your audience is so that you understand their levels of interest in different topics and how they like to engage. It is important to know who you are creating content for. Start by defining your primary, secondary and sometimes even tertiary audiences, as these groups will guide the direction of your programming in so many ways. Consider who your current audience is and the audience you would like to attract to your programs and events as well. Are they the same? Chances interests.

Lesson #2: “But did you ask her?!”

Once you have identified your audience(s), the next question you should ask is: “What are the top three priorities of each audience type?” closely followed by: “What frequency do they like to receive information?” A common pitfall I have seen is the assumption that we know what other people want to know and how often. Surveying your audience before you build your programming is key to guiding your topic selection process and determining how often you provide it. A great point recently shared with me was, “It’s not your goals that will define great event content. It’s theirs.” Survey before you build a program or event to determine what your audience wants to know.

Survey again after to assess how on or off the mark your content was so you can make future adjustments to improve.

Lesson #3: “Not everything needs to be a webinar.”

After you have identified your audience and surveyed them to determine their top priorities, the final step is choosing the appropriate modality to drive home your program objectives. In professional development, modality is the delivery method by which we provide the education, and each delivery method has its place in your overall professional development plan. Will your event be virtual or in-person? Live or pre-recorded? Instructorled or self-paced? Do you have the resources to support each type of modality and how often? The options are endless and therefore it is important to know who your audience is, their top priorities, how often they want to receive information, and (drumroll please) how they prefer to ENGAGE in meeting their priorities. Having a clear understanding of each point up front will help you map out a very clearly defined professional development strategy without sacrificing time and energy on guesswork to meet your audience’s needs. Modalities can be anything from a lunch-and-learn, a webinar, a conference, a whitepaper or even an article in Advisor Today (winks at the camera).

Practicing what you preach: The future of NAIFA professional development The lessons shared above are how the Professional Development team at NAIFA has started to transition the process for how we create and deliver programming that resonates with the specific needs of both our current and future audiences. This means designing educational content in a variety of modalities that will appeal to different learning styles and packaging these in a way that is easily digestible. While there is still work to do and until we are able to move back into more in-person programming modalities, we are making the foundational adjustments now to build a solid professional development stream digitally that will include the rollout of a new Learning Management System (LMS) in Q2 and also includes our partnership with Zoom.

As the world begins to open back up, the future is bright for NAIFA professional development, and we will continue to meet the educational needs of our members and the industry with our chapters and national programs. There is no better time than now to share topic ideas, speaker suggestions and any other information you would like to provide on how we can continue to improve the programming at programs@ naifa.org. All feedback is welcome and helps us to better serve you. Trust me, I educate people.