Career path: Will Woodman and Dawn Crowley

Graduate Will, who, after a slightly shaky start at insurer Strobes Ingliss Norton feels he is now doing well, has just been informed that his manager Nick Howard and the firm's training manager want to see him for "a chat".

Okay, he thinks, he might have messed up his first attempt at IF1 last year, but since then he's studied hard to pass the re-sit of IF1 and IF2, so it should be a breeze to complete a third module and get his CII Certificate later this year. What, then, Will wonders, is the problem?

Dawn, meanwhile, was initially pleased and excited to take on additional responsibilities for the induction and supervision of new arrivals at the Kwality Insurance call centre. But now she is starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

Without the benefit of any formal training, her line manager Fern Foxlake seems to expect her to run a growing team with minimal support and still meet her own demanding call targets. Dawn is someone who hates doing anything badly and is definitely starting to feel overstretched.

She has asked repeatedly if she can go on team leadership training, but Fern's usual response is a rueful sigh and the single word "budgets".

At a recent work party - in the course of a long and somewhat inebriated conversation covering everything from Aston Villa to the relative merits
of guitars and sequencers - Dawn rashly confided some of her concerns and frustrations to Bill Wescott from Jervis Dixon's high net worth team, who reminded her of a favourite uncle and seemed more than willing to lend a sympathetic ear.

She now worries she may have been a bit too frank, though Bill continues to smile affably whenever their paths cross. Her drunken comments, however, will shortly come back to affect her future in a dramatic way.

Will, meanwhile, is on his way in for that dreaded chat. 

Read part two in Post next week

Written by Ian Jerrum, Searchlight Insurance Training