President's Message

Presidential Theme for the Year

When considering my theme for the year I was thinking about what we actually aim to do as a local institute, for both the CII and for our members. So, I have decided to take the theme of Educate, Develop, Involve and Grow.

 

Educate: 

I have asked Fiona Cambridge, along with Gary Ferguson, to continue the successful scheme that she started this year with Forthill Integrated College to talk to sixth form pupils and outline the career potential and variety of roles available across General Insurance and the PFS in Northern Ireland. This will again hopefully include the offer a week’s work experience to a number of them with various local insurance businesses. It is hoped that we may even be able to expand the scheme to another school with the help of the careers teacher at Forthill.

I have asked Fiona Coulter to continue to run the CII Certificate course that has been so successful over the past two years.

I get the impression that, at the minute, a lot of younger members appear to stop studying after completing the CII Certificate. So, I have also asked Fiona Coulter to bring a proposal to council for the running of a Diploma course in order to try to encourage more of them to study further and gain higher qualifications.

Develop:  

The main thing is to continue to provide professional development for our members through our excellent CPD Masterclass Series, organised by Jackie McGirr and the CPD committee. Where we will continue to assess what topics our members need to know about and would like to hear presentations on.

As most of our CPD events are attended mainly by senior people, I feel we should also try to consider the possibility of running an event specifically targeted at younger professionals.

Involve:

To continue to involve our members with our local institute through social and networking events. Possibly making sure that alcohol is available for the social events, unlike our ten-pin bowling this year. I don’t know what that says about insurance people but, having taken what can best be described as ‘constructive feedback’ from those present, it is what it is.

Secondly, to continue to try and involve more local insurance business with the IINI. It is disappointing that there are still a number of local businesses that don’t really engage with the us and I feel we should try again to reach out to them.

Grow:

By continuing to do who we do to help our members grow as professionals

Secondly, to continue to grow the membership and its participation with the IINI

To continue to grow the reputation of the Insurance Institute of Northern, which is acknowledged as one of the leading local CII institutes.

So, in summary to basically continue to do the work that I feel we do very well but to always be looking for ways to adapt and improve our offering to our members.