Last week I had the opportunity to visit a few agencies that are members of our association.  They happen to live on the western half of the state and I wanted to report to all of our members what they had to say.  I constantly have to keep in mind that I am on the firing lines for the association.  What I mean is that I am usually the person who hears the complaints about what we are doing wrong first. 

With that in mind the largest complaint that I heard from the Western region was that we offer no continuing education that isn’t several hours drive away for their agencies.  When I was talking with John Massey of J.G. Elliott in Scottsbluff he urged me to think less in terms of IF we could afford to put on the classes but more of IF could we not afford to put them on.   John, I agree with you.   I also spoke with Dave McCarville from First National Insurance in Sidney about the same topic.  Dave seemed to have some good suggestions as to how to alleviate my issue of spending thousands on a class and having only a few agents show up.  The solution to this would be offer proctored classes through the local community colleges.  

Here’s what I’m thinking, we offer the same classes to the western half of the state but instead of spending thousands sending all of us there we telecast the class and have a proctor for the class to monitor the students.  This seems like a viable solution that has been a problem for many years. 

We have some wonderful Independent agencies on the western half of Nebraska and they deserve the same services that the eastern half receives.  I myself have made a commitment to get this project started.  Technology has come a long way, why don’t we use it more often??

Best,

Liz  

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