Door to door salespeople are still aplenty, but the days of selling insurance door to door are long gone, unless you have taken the time to undergo your state’s required education and training for an insurance license. Every state has a licensing commissioner, and it is this agency’s responsibility to hand down to insurance salespeople the requirements for soliciting consumers for the purchase of insurance. It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in selling auto insurance or health insurance – you can’t simply walk into an office of Geico or Highmark and request a job application. First, you will need to decide what type of insurance you want to sell – home, health, business, auto, life, etc. – and then you will have to pursue the educational avenues that are required.
Salesman lost. by loop_1, on Flickr. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Find a Relevant School and Training to Take Your Insurance License
Generally, secondary education provides a broad, generalized degree that may provide all of the education you’ll need to sell insurance. But if you’re not sure, don’t tie yourself up with two to four years invested in classes and a lot of student loan. Instead, jump straight to a continuing education school. In this type of school, the classes you will attend are very specific to your desired career path – in this case, insurance. These types of schools used to be called night schools or nursing school, simply because the overwhelming majority of students who attended these schools did so at night (after work or caring for their families), and went because they wanted to train to become a certified CNA or RN. Today, you’ll find that these schools are open all day and night, may have weekend courses, and can even be attended online.
By choosing a relevant school to take your insurance licensing courses at, you know first and foremost that you won’t waste any time with your new-found education path. You won’t be taking standard math, science and English classes. Instead, you’ll be taking only the classes that pertain to the insurance selling industry. Additionally, many of these types of schools offer job shadowing opportunities that may even include on-the-job training. Sometimes this training can even be counted as credits towards your certification, which means you can shave off classroom hours while gaining experience at the same time!
During your insurance education coursework you can expect there to be classes to attend, homework to complete, and periodic tests to take. For job shadowing, you may be assigned additional work that pertains to what you learned and perhaps even trained in. There are also final exams you will need to pass in order to receive state-issued certification. And remember that your state-issued certification is good only in your particular state. If you plan on selling insurance in more than one state, you’ll need to contact those states’ insurance commissioner board and find out what their licensing requirements are.
