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A year ago, the International Risk Management Institute (IRMI) introduced the Construction Risk and Insurance Specialist (CRIS) certification, which signals contractors that insurance agents and brokers who have earned it possess a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the risks contractors need to insure against.
The CRIS courses also have valuable information available for contractors and their managers who develop risk management strategies and purchase insurance. In fact, a notable number of the professionals who have started or completed the CRIS curriculum are contractors or employees of construction firms, according to IRMI's executive director, Jack Gibson.
Filling a knowledge gap. Gibson, who designed the program and wrote several of the courses, saw there were many brokers and agents who were generalists who could not properly service their contractor clients because they were not developing insurance programs that would adequately address their special needs.
The program is also designed to educate contractors and their employees, such as CFOs, risk managers, in-house counsel, and contracting officers, about the insurance available to cover the risks they face and how the insurance works.
The idea is to make contractors educated consumers and the brokers that service them more knowledgeable. The anticipated effect is to make contractors more competitive in their business by enabling them to have a cost-effective insurance plan in place.
As in-house counsel to a small construction and real estate development company, I found many of the courses to contain practical information. For example, how the insurance market works, how to analyze whether your claim is covered, how to determine which policy period applies to the claim you received, what to look for in coverage, what additional add-on's might be useful to contractors, and how claims are administered.
As the program instructions recommend, I took the "Fundamentals of Construction Risk Management" course first. It contains the most valuable information for those who are not insurance specialists and is a springboard for the core courses, which are more detailed and technical in nature (see the sidebar below). The course also addresses how to read the policies. For example:
* Carefully read the declarations page to confirm the coverage requested is actually what is being supplied;
* Check that the endorsements listed are attached; and
* Confirm there are...