People

Imagine that you visited your doctor tomorrow for advice and discovered that she hadn’t updated her knowledge or skills since she qualified 20 years ago.  How confident would you feel about taking her advice?

It is vital to remember that you, as an employer, are bound by data protection obligations and often this is not recognised on application forms.  Any evidence of an employee’s right to work in the UK and any financial or criminal information is sensitive personal information and must be treated as such.  Whilst certain roles (particularly those in the caring professions and involving vulnerable adults and children, for example) may require the employer to check an applicant's criminal background, this is unlikely to be relevant for the majority of insurance brokers, since the request for information must be ‘proportionate’ to the role.

As the year progresses, you may be finding that resolutions set on the 1st of January have lost momentum or been forgotten about. Even with the best of intentions, juggling both life and work pressures can de-rail your personal and professional goals.

Learning skills that are not necessarily vital for work may actually be a benefit to the job. A survey of more than a thousand adults, conducted by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), found that the UK is a nation of prospective learners. 50 per cent of the survey respondents said they would be prepared to take up a course to improve their skills in areas of interest to them, with 60 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds expressing the desire to learn new skills.