At every TPSU (The Plan Sponsor University) program we start with two questions: 1) Is managing your company’s retirement plan your only job; and 2) Do you have formal training to manage an ERSIA plan? The reality is that most HR and finance people in charge of their company’s defined contribution (DC) plan wear many hats and very few receive formal education to run their plan. In fact, they usually get the job because someone left or got moved and there was no one else to manage the plan. But these HR and finance people play a critical role and education is the key to help the company manage fees, liability and work while helping employees to retire on time.
At TPSU, which has conducted over 150 half-day training programs held at local colleges and universities with over 70 scheduled or completed in 2016, we strive to provide the best education. Learning from the collaboration with UCLA Anderson School of Management Executive Education at TRAU (The Retirement Advisor University), we learned two key things about educating adults:
- Adults don’t learn by listening, they learn by interacting.
- Adults don’t trust experts. Along with a bit of sales cynicism, they want to hear what others like them are doing, not what experts tell them to do. Witness the growth of social media over traditional media.
So TPSU strives to bring the best experts to each program making sure that not only is the content relevant but also that it is not a blatant sales pitch. Not only is a sales pitch less valuable, people tune out. Speakers, which include a local advisor and national experts from record keepers, money managers, CPAs, attorney and TPAs, are trained to engage so that when plan sponsors are split into smaller groups, there’s active dialogue. The program ends with creating individualized action plans.
All of which sounds like a sales pitch for TPSU. Our biggest resistance is that plan sponsors think that TPSU is just a marketing scheme – one attendee after a program told us to just tell people it is not. But that sounds self-serving so we put together a short video which inlcudes plan sponsors and advisors about their experience. Don’t trust us (experts) – trust your peers.
