Designations Galore

I’m slowly becoming more settled into my new position with the Knights of Columbus. I do a number of things for my councils–assist with recruitment, integrate new members into council life (although, ideally, the council itself wouldn’t need me for this), assist members with financial planning and helping them with the various options to implement those plans.

The programming side of my position is something I could do with my eyes closed. Nothing really new, not much of a learning curve. Slightly different implementation of the same basic principles I’ve been working for sometime now. The financial side of my position, while I’m comfortable overall, requires a great deal of training, continuing education and frankly, experience in order to perform at the level I expect out of myself.

One thing that is different than the training and continuing education that I immersed myself in when working at the UCC is that everything has letters. What I mean is that many of the training programs carry “designations” that are post-nominal notions. For example, the Knights of Columbus is a fraternal benefits society which has joined with the hundreds of other “fraternals” in an association that created a couple of these designations. Currently, I’m studying material for the FIC, fraternal insurance counselor, designation. The FIC requires a number of courses and is a prereq for the FICF, fraternal insurance counselor fellow, which has a few more courses dealing with more advanced topics.

The letters go on and on. There is the CLU, CFP, ChFC, CASL, CSA, LUTCF, CLF, CAP, MSFS (like it looks, this is a Master of Science degree in Financial Services) and probably many more. I think it a bit of a carrot and stick situation; encourages folks to continue their education if they get to show it off on paper in addition to in action.

Starting FIC Basic (the first of three courses). I’ll keep you up to date.