A Letter from Phyllis Shelton

Hello, I'm Phyllis Shelton and welcome to LTCI Academy, the result of a three-year effort to fullfil my dream to deliver long-term care insurance training 24/7/365. U.S. News & World Report (10/15/01) said "Even before the 9/11 attacks which left many employees reluctant to travel, some experts predicted that 80% of corporate training would be delivered electronically in three years." By 2005, the U.S. Army will spend more than $450 billion to beam eLearning classes to soldiers worldwide (eLearning Magazine, 11/01), and McDonalds has Hamburger University!

Having been on the live training end for a decade, I can tell you that live training doesn't scratch the surface to meet the training needs for long-term care insurance. You know the objections:
  • too much time out of the field - lost productivity and time away from your family
  • too expensive - even if your company pays your tuition, there's still travel expenses
  • too costly to the sponsoring organization with the meeting facility, equipment, food, trainers' expenses and a host of other charges
  • not everyone can attend the live training class there isn't another one scheduled in the near future for new agents
  • inconsistency with the information imparted in live training classes - the trainer on the east coast does it very differently than the trainer on the west coast or in the central U.S. region
Right now, we have mostly a few people selling a lot. We need a lot of agents selling something - even if it's just one policy a week. That effort would explode market penetration for this critically needed product almost overnight. We simply can't afford to pay for the baby boomers on public assistance, and until we figure out a way to make private LTC insurance work in this country, we are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic!

But agents who have client relationships built on years of great service won't jeopardize those relationships to sell something new unless the agent's confidence level in the new product is very high. Therein lies the problem. Without 24/7/365 training that is easy to access, the confidence level doesn't grow, and the sales aren't made. Then another agent makes the sale to the client, and the next thing the original agent knows, the LTCI agent is proposing other products. There's no reason to allow this to happen to you, now that LTCI Academy is here to meet your LTCI training needs at YOUR convenience, on YOUR time, and on YOUR schedule for a fraction of the cost of live training.

In addition to helping you take care of your clients and grow your book of business and in addition to helping avert what I feel will be the worst economic crisis our nation has ever seen if the baby boomers fall onto public assistance for LTC, I wanted to create a training experience that is FUN. All of us have seen web-based training that shows pretty pictures and reads to us, or worse, we have to sit and read pages of text…z-z-z. How quickly does it take to zone out during that experience?

After looking from coast to coast for the perfect technology partner, we found Little Planet Learning. I didn't want a partner from within the insurance industry - I wanted a technology partner who specializes in distance learning. Little Planet employs the cognitive science advanced by Dr. John Bransford, Director of the Learning Institute at Vanderbilt University and author of the textbook, How People Learn. Cognitive science revolutionizes the three "R's" method of learning. There is simply too much information today to memorize facts. Learning today means teaching students to find the information they're looking for, assimilate it appropriately to meet the specific informational need. You can see in the "Who We Are" section that Little Planet Learning has mastered this teaching technique for distance learning, in addition to bringing Hollywood to your computer screen. Little Planet is owned by Bill Nelson, a former Academy-award nominated sound producer who has worked on many successful motion pictures such as Roots, Back to the Future (all three), Lethal Weapon and so forth.

With LTCI Academy, you MUST interact with the program vs. watching information passively on your screen, and we've prepared a special demo to show you the interactivity of the site (click here to view demo). You'll be able to see the list of all the lessons with a short description of each, and we've made the Government Solutions with the LTCI tax incentives live for you to try out. But first, be sure and watch "The Stickmans" to appreciate how incredibly meaningful our job is with long-term care insurance.