Aviva Development Zone – Coronavirus Update:
To all our dedicated learners and supervisors,
Please be assured, at a time of great uncertainty, that the Aviva Development Zone team at RWA is ready to support you and your business.
With new ways of working, come new challenges, but fortunately the Development Zone is geared to help you adapt.
The platform has a wealth of features. Some of these you may already utilise, while others you may not have considered - from wellbeing courses to customisable content and quick quizzes to help refresh your knowledge of key regulatory areas.
The article below is the first in a new series of articles that will be published over the coming weeks to provide useful signposting, share tips on the best ways to utilise the platform, and showcase features that you may not be familiar with.
As always, if you need support, please contact us via devzone@rwagroup.co.uk and we will provide the assistance required.
Be in touch and best wishes to you all,
The Aviva Development Zone Team – RWA Business Consultancy
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Remote Working – A chance to catch up on CPD?
Over the last few weeks, our daily lives and routines have changed significantly, with many of us having to prepare for an extended period of working from home. Over the coming weeks, things will hopefully get easier as we become used to things and business settles into a new routine.
It’s important that we all recognise that the same professional responsibilities we have to our clients continue to apply. This particularly includes being sensitive to the situations our clients (and colleagues) may find themselves in over the coming weeks and months, particularly where clients may already have been identified as vulnerable customers. The concept of treating all customers fairly remains at the heart of what we do.
Depending on the nature of your role and the workload in your own businesses, you may find that the coming weeks provide an opportunity to reflect. If you have a long commute, for example, but no longer have to travel to work you may find you have more spare hours in your day. Why not take this time to continue your own professional development – ensuring that you maintain your professional competence and technical knowledge. For insurance brokers, the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) has introduced the requirement to record 15 hours’ CPD per year over eight core knowledge areas. Are you (or your team) on schedule to meet this target?
The Aviva Development Zone is a great tool to support you and your colleagues while you are working in different locations, and our dedicated support team is still available by phone and email to help you.
We’ve come up with a few suggestions for activities and tools on the Development Zone that you might find helpful.
CPD Tools
Your CPD Record is probably the most important place on the Development Zone where your achievements are recorded. It provides you with a single store of evidence to demonstrate your competence and professional standards to both supervisors within your firm, and to professional bodies. Producing a strong CPD Record makes it easier to judge your commitment and performance and helps with role appraisals.
If you view your CPD Record on the Development Zone, you should see that entries for completed activities have got an “Improve” button shown alongside them. The Improve button is only available for activities that have been marked as completed takes you to a page similar to the “Record My CPD” page, but with an advisory section provided to the right of each of the four sections. Each advisory section is based on an analysis of the information already provided and will contain feedback or guidance about how to improve the entry and ensure that it presents your learning and development in the best possible way.
The CPD Mentor feature (available via the buttons at the very bottom of your CPD Record) offers similar advice but based on a wider analysis of all CPD entries that you have recorded during the current year. It analyses the data for evidence of over a dozen common issues, ranging from records that appear to be duplicated, missing information such as dates or development needs, right through to finding dates where you appear to have completed activities on the Development Zone but not created a related CPD entry.
Custom Content Tools
If you’re a supervisor for your organisation, now might be a good time to explore some of the Custom Content tools available to you on the Development Zone. These provide great opportunities to develop and share your own training content with learners in your firm. For example, you could upload guidance or advice to learners as Reading Material and set a verification question to check that they’ve understood a key point. Or, you could set learners an Offline Task to complete away from the Development Zone, such as a research task or providing evidence of reviewing a client file. There’s a whole range of activities available via the Custom Content Catalogue.
Refreshing your technical knowledge
Don’t forget, our catalogue of over 700 topics is still fully accessible, wherever you access the Development Zone from. Now might be a great time to review some of the modules covering recent regulatory changes around IDD and the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR), or taking time to reflect and look at ways of identifying vulnerable customers or dealing with difficult customers. As the impact of the current movement restrictions and guidance is felt by more and more people, it’s important to make sure that you’re able to manage your own work effectively, so stress and time management may also be good topics to familiarise yourself with.
