Continuing education is a key part in keeping your insurance license in good standing. Continuing education is meant to help insurance professionals stay up to date on products and ethics within the insurance industry. Each state has their own ethics requirements in terms of hours required to renew a license and the types of classes that are acceptable for credit. For example, in the State of Colorado, insurance professionals are required to have 24 hours of continuing education credits every two years. Of that 24 hours, 3 hours must be ethics, 18 hours must relate to major insurance lines of business, and 3 hours may be miscellaneous. Additionally, insurance professionals in Colorado can’t repeat the same courses year to year, they must take new courses with new topics each year. It’s important that insurance professionals research their state’s requirements and follow them; not having the appropriate credits will prohibit you from renewing your insurance license.
There are many ways to obtain your continuing education requirements. Below is a list of sources our agents use to obtain their credits:
- Online Courses: Online courses are usually paid courses through companies such as Kaplan Financial or WebCE, though there are dozens of companies available. Online courses allow you to complete your studying in your own time and it also allows you to customize the content you are learning. Online courses also allow you to spread out the classes over the allowable period of time in your state.
- In-Person Classes: some people like to take in-person classes and get all their credit done at once. This can mean taking a three-day, 8 hours per day course that covers the required material. It allows the individual to get their credits done at one time and enables people who prefer in-person learning to complete their classes that way.
- Professional Designations: many professional designation courses provide the individual with continuing education credits in their home state. Designation courses such as Certified Insurance Counselors (CIC), Certified Insurance Service Representatives (CISR), or Certified Personal Risk Managers (CPRM) are courses that provide continuing education credits, while the individual is working towards their designation.
- Carrier Offered Courses: many of the insurance carriers provide agents with free continuing education opportunities throughout the year. Whether that is free online carrier sponsored courses, free in-person courses about a specific line of business (i.e. homeowners), or even topic-specific courses provided to your agency only are opportunities to gain credits.
At Secure American Insurance, we make sure that our agents have numerous opportunities throughout the year to get their CE credits. We understand fitting in separate classes on weekends can be hard, so we set up free carrier sponsored classes during the year, we provide agents with free online classes when available, and provide a database of CE resources for each agent. Staying on top of your CE credits is important and as an agency, we want to make the process as simple as possible for our team.