UK: Aviva’s Underwriting Academy celebrates success

Aviva’s Underwriting Academy marks its tenth year anniversary by achieving the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) Prior Learning Accreditation in six commercial programmes.

This means that when our commercial underwriters pass their evaluation for any of our six accredited programmes, they’ll gain CII Prior Learning credits at Diploma or Advanced Diploma level.

The success further demonstrates Aviva’s commitment to professionalism and learning and development across the underwriting teams and complements the achievement of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) accreditation from the CII in May 2010 by the Underwriting Academy.

Jamie Lye, Aviva’s head of underwriting effectiveness, says: “When we set up our Underwriting Academy 10 years ago we wanted to create learning programmes to equip our 2,200 underwriters with the tools to develop their underwriting capability.

“We’re very proud of our achievement. We’ve worked extremely hard to develop really effective training and evaluation programmes and to have this work recognised and endorsed by the CII, our industry body, is a fantastic achievement.

“This latest Prior Learning Accreditation in our six commercial programmes means we are absolutely on the right road and totally supports our aim of demonstrating world class underwriting.

“The team is currently working on another 12 programmes for Prior Learning accreditation later this year.”

The Underwriting Academy, founded in 2001, offers around 215 training modules covering commercial property, liability, motor and specialist classes and personal lines of business for all Aviva’s commercial underwriters.

Tamsin Mills, director of accreditation services at the CII, says: "The CII’s Prior Learning Accreditation process and standards are rigorous - they focus on ensuring that technical content, standards of evaluations and processes are all of a consistently high standard.

“We were very impressed with the structured training programme Aviva’s Underwriting Academy provides and are delighted to award them Prior Learning Accreditation"

-ends-

Notes to editors:

Aviva is the world’s sixth largest* insurance group. We provide more than 53 million customers with insurance, savings and investment products with total worldwide sales in 2010 of £47.1 billion**.

We are the UK’s largest insurer with 19 million customers and one in three households has a relationship with us. Our combination of life, health and general insurance is unique in its scale and breadth in the UK market. Customers can choose to buy our products through intermediaries, our corporate partners or from Aviva direct and we have become the partner of choice for many of the UK’s biggest organisations.

We are ranked as one of the UK’s top 10 most valuable brands and Aviva plc are in the top 10% of socially responsible companies globally in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. In 2010 we invested £4.3m into our communities in the UK, which included 1,500 Aviva volunteers giving 24,000 hours for good causes. In addition, our employees gave £600,000 through fundraising and donating. Read our corporate responsibility report at www.aviva.com/2010cr.

Aviva is working in partnership with Railway Children through the Aviva Street to School programme to get children living or working on UK streets back into everyday life. Find out more at www.aviva.co.uk/street-to-school.

The Aviva media centre at www.aviva.com/media includes images, company and product information and a news release archive.

For broadcast-standard video, please visit www.aviva.com/media/video/.

Follow us on twitter: www.twitter.com/avivaplc

* based on gross worldwide premiums at 31 December 2009.
** at 31 December 2010.