Insurance or Construction? The Range of Careers Available at Premier Guarantee

Posted by Premier Guarantee on 23rd March 2022 -

“No two days are the same.”

“One day I might be in the office, the next out on a construction site.”

“There’s a real sense of satisfaction that we are helping customers build much-needed new homes.”

These are just some of the comments from staff at Premier Guarantee. During this National Careers Week we explain why there is such a variety of career options and pathways here.

Insurance… or construction?

 Are we an insurance firm or a construction company? In a way, both! We don’t actually build anything ourselves but we partner closely with builders and developers that do. We have a deep involvement in the sector.

Managing risk is a complex task and requires a network of skilled, qualified surveyors to achieve it. They are supported by technical experts who can help answer specific questions or devise solutions for more challenging design and construction elements.

Then there is our insurance side, which includes trained underwriters whose job is to assess the level of risk posed by projects and calculate a premium that reflects that risk.

We operate an in-house dispute resolution service, which requires a team of people that understand our policies, roles and responsibilities of all parties involved, and have excellent mediation and negotiation skills.

Then there is our claims team, whose role is to assess the level of damage caused by latent defects and award payment for valid claims.

Because we are a financial services company we are heavily regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. This means everyone in the organisation must undertake a minimum level of relevant training every year. Regular learning is good practice in any case, and Premier Guarantee gives all its employees many options for learning and career progression.

Building the skilled workforce of the future

Perhaps we are builders after all – because we are building the next generation of surveyors and construction technical experts!

The company provides three main avenues for personal and professional development:

1. Company-sponsored qualification and accreditation via external professional bodies, such as the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) or the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE).
2. Via apprenticeships, where professional qualifications can be achieved through a combination of “on-the-job” learning, tasks and training.
3. Using the company’s in-house learning and development portal or via third-party learning tools providing “soft skill” courses, useful for employees in any discipline

Training for technical staff

Surveyors can start as trainees, apprentices or graduates. They can move from standard house-type surveying to bespoke housing, residential blocks and commercial developments, and finally to complex conversions and major project (high-rise) schemes.

We help staff obtain and maintain their professional status in CABE, the Chartered Institute of Building and RICS, where relevant to their roles. This includes counselling and support such as mock interviews and covering professional fees. In a year heavily affected by Covid, we helped seven people gain professional qualifications and accreditation.

There is a dedicated Academy for technical staff, e-learning, face-to-face and webinar courses, a dedicated Technical Resource Hub and Technical Training Team, and all new starters receive a six-month structured Induction Plan.

Training for office-based roles

All staff undertake a business induction, which includes compliance training required by the FCA and further learning about our products and services, health and safety, customer services and complaints handling, the Consumer Code for Homebuilders and workplace equality.

Line managers and those aspiring to be managers can request specialist training too, while all employees are encouraged to undertake soft-skills workshops and consider learning via the CII, which can lead to industry-accepted insurance qualifications.

Career progression at Premier Guarantee

With all the learning and development potential at Premier Guarantee, it will come as no surprise that there are plenty of career progression opportunities available to staff willing to commit.

We welcome ambitious people, of course, and offering learning and career progression helps us retain key skills within the sector. We help people start their construction careers – we don’t want the sector to then lose them!

In the past 12 months we have:

• Signed up 10 apprentices, 4 of which have completed their apprenticeship
• Had 10 people pass their CII exams
• Seen five people pass their CABE qualifications
• Promoted 81 people, 37 from the office and 44 from our remote teams: That’s almost one in five of our workforce!

We are hiring

A number of roles are available with us right now. So if National Careers Week causes you to re-evaluate your career, please take a look at the opportunities available here now. Plus, you could read more about our work opportunities via the article links below.

Please Note: Every care was taken to ensure the information in this article was correct at the time of publication.