Secondary school education is the bare minimum you need to know or hear about insurance. However, even without education, you would know a thing or two, depending on your society. Insurance is easy to define but when you dig deeper, you'll find a complex maze of data to unpack.
One of the perks of my new job is that I get thrust into this magical world of insurance and I'm required to have it at my fingertips in a short space of time.
In just one week, quite a lot of information has been crammed into our head and instead of feeling like a job, it has been a bit more like a classroom. A classroom where you're bombarded with a lot of information that can be boring for some but for me at least, it has been an excellent experience.
The first difficulty I experienced was the cultural gap that I had to bridge. Insurance may have one universal definition but implementation varies between different societies.
In Nigeria, for example, Insurance is optional. The only compulsory information you need is your car registration to prove that you didn't steal the car.
In the UK, motor insurance is mandated by law through the 1988 Road Traffic Act which requires every driver to at least have 3rd party insurance. So, in the UK, while you are trying to "sell" motor insurance, you aren't required to actually aggressively shill it because of the regulations surrounding it.
So, this means that every vehicle owner in the UK has internalised the general concept of insurance and has their own unique interactions with their insurers. Due to my background, this was completely new to me, even though I used to have a car in Nigeria.
The first two days were the most challenging because I wasn't used to some of the terms that were casually thrown around in class. However, on Wednesday, it all started to make sense because we started looking at real-life scenarios.
Just like every industry, Insurance has its own unique glossary of typically used words and phrases. Terms like premium, indemnify and write-off are just three of the typically used terms you would hear in class. The challenge was familiarising myself with the terms and well, so far, so good.
Insurance is very complex and I'd delve deeper into it to get better understanding of the topic and apply it to my life. I also look forward to sharing some of my knowledge and hopefully, it'll be useful to someone.