Become an Insurance Agent In No Time with these Helpful Tips

Despite our own desires and best wishes, things often tend to get quite messy in life.

14:09 30 December 2019

People lose jobs they were quite good at. Homes burn down, taking with them families’ most valuable belongings and years of memories. Accidents happen on the road, no matter how careful you are as a driver because it’s not just you who’s out there. Incidents happen at the workplace, even if you exercise extreme caution. This is why it is always important to take out insurance policies whenever you can since you never know when bad luck would hit you. What if you want to become an insurance agent to help people protect their assets and avoid a lot of pain and suffering? Well, you can just apply to become one. Here’s how.

Education 

You don’t actually need a bachelor’s degree to become an insurance agent, though it can make quite a difference in how your career would progress in the future. A college education can help you move into more advanced jobs when it comes to insurance, like risk management and becoming an actuary. The business, finance, and economics disciplines you would study while acquiring your bachelor’s degree could make quite an impact on your level of knowledge of that world, and in turn how well you would do in it. 

There is also an option to complete an associate’s program to complete the required prelicensing education, which will vary from one state to the other –– as will the number of hours you have to complete. So, you need to do a little research on the requirements wherever you are before applying to the licensing exam, which you will need to pass to be eligible to work as an insurance agent.

Select a niche 

As you probably already know, there are quite a few different specialties in the insurance world, and you need to select one so you could start working on selling it. You have life insurance, which pertains to selling policies that provide a beneficiary with money if the insured party dies. There is health insurance, which are policies pertaining to Medicare and providing the insured with healthcare whenever sick. There are also cars, houses, valuable products, casualty, and several other insurance policies. It is important that you select just one you are interested in to focus your efforts. 

Choose a location 

As we mentioned earlier, licensing requirements will vary from one state to the other, and you’d do well to research those before applying for the exam so you don’t meet any unexpected perquisites. As you can see in this helpful guide, you will need to look up the names of the states’ insurance bodies –– because they vary from one to the other. They each have their own website, so a good place to start would be checking that out so you could form an idea of what you will need to do to be licensed there. It is possible to work in more than one state, but you will need to stick to the rules of each while working. 

Find an agency 

After passing the licensing exam, and selecting a niche as well as a state to work in, you will need to start researching agencies that would hire you. You should actually start this process as soon as possible because you might find agencies that are willing to hire you even if you are not licensed yet, which is great because you will get to gain experience early on without wasting any time until you get your official license. So, start looking at the different agencies and their requirements so you could begin the application processes. When you are eligible to work at insurance companies, you can apply to anything from small local brokerages to major insurance carriers and regional offices. 

Work on your people skills 

The most important tip an insurance agent needs to apply is to work on their people skills. This job entails dealing with a lot of people and trying to sell them insurance policies, so you need to be very good at handling them and their complaints. This isn’t exactly a job for the introverts, and even if you are, that will have to change if you want to make it in this business. It will be up to you to work on developing those skills, though you will get better with practice and time. 

Becoming an insurance agent is quite promising, it is a career that has a huge potential because people will never stop buying insurance policies. The most critical thing, though, is to never stop working on acquiring knowledge, from the minute you consider getting this job.