Behind the scenes on how ACA International revamped two of its most popular Core Curriculum products: FDCPA Essentials for the Accounts Receivable Management Industry and Essential Collection Skills and Techniques.
1/21/2020 9:00
Your company relies on employees who understand the complexities of today’s accounts receivable management industry. This knowledge isn’t something you can—or should—expect them to pick up on the fly, which is why ACA provides education opportunities for your staff at every stage of their career.
The foundation of that education lies in ACA’s Essentials courses, which deliver compulsory training on federal regulatory compliance, industry terminology, communication techniques and best practices—the building blocks of a successful collection professional.
In 2019, ACA completely rebuilt two of its most popular Core Curriculum products: FDCPA Essentials for the Accounts Receivable Management Industry (FDCPA) and Essential Collection Skills and Techniques (ECST). The content, layout, user experience and delivery: everything was put under a microscope, dissected, analyzed, reconstructed and enhanced to ensure it was meeting the needs of our members as comprehensively as possible, Collector magazine Managing Editor Anne Rosso May reports in the January issue.
If you think that sounds like a big project, you’re right. Let’s look at how an enthusiastic and passionate group of association staff and members made it happen.
The Development Process
ACA’s Education Council is a group of 11 volunteer members tasked with regularly reviewing the association’s education products and seminar curriculum. Together with our skilled on-staff education team, they help create ACA’s training and professional development opportunities.
When the Education Council started hearing feedback from ACA’s Certified Instructors and trainees requesting updates to the ECST and FDCPA products—which had last been refreshed in 2012—they knew it was time to completely rethink these essential tools.
“We have such amazing new talent at ACA right now—board members, Certified Instructors and Education Council members, including new ACA staff—with so many new ideas and fresh perspectives on the curriculum that it was the perfect time to really drill down and tackle this project,” said Beth Conklin, account executive for State Collection Service Inc. and member of ACA’s Education Council.
It was a massive project, requiring ACA staff and a substantial team of volunteer subject matter experts to carefully evaluate members’ challenges and determine how these products could more effectively help them succeed.
Education Council Chair LaDonna Bohling, IFCCE, chief compliance officer at Receivable Solutions Inc., served on a subcommittee of Certified Instructors and attorneys who reviewed the material and determined not only what information needed to be changed, but also how it could better fit with today’s modern collection departments.
The team compiled input on what they felt needed changing and worked with ACA Compliance Education Specialist Angela Czerlanis to incorporate their ideas.
What’s New in the Updated Curriculum
ACA’s Essentials courses are designed for employee onboarding and standardized retraining, and both the FDCPA and ECST products can be used as part of an effective overall collector training program. Plus, they play a key role in your employees’ professional development as they are prerequisites to earning ACA’s Professional Collection Specialist (PCS) designation.
They are available in instructor-led, self-paced and e-learning formats so you can choose your optimal learning experience.
ACA members who achieve ACA’s Trainer Specialist designation can use the Essentials resources to train and test groups at their companies.
“These products get used a lot,” Bohling said, making it even more crucial that the information they contain is fresh and engaging.
The new ECST is a second-generation redesign of ACA’s Professional Telephone Collectors’ Techniques course, and was structured to improve collectors’ ability to adapt to a variety of consumer personality types to secure more payments and reduce the number of broken promises to pay.
The Education Council decided to reintroduce the popular “8 Checkpoints in a Collection Call” concept, which had been absent from the material since 2012. (For a peek at this, check out the “Collection Tips” column in the November issue of Collector magazine.)
ACA’s FDCPA training program provides collectors with a solid foundation to communicate effectively with consumers and apply those concepts during collection calls. It was substantially redesigned to emphasize the most crucial aspects collectors need to know about the law and how to apply this knowledge when communicating with consumers.
The FDCPA course shows collectors how to have a productive and compliant call with a consumer, including how to determine a right-party contact, how to deliver the mini-Miranda disclosure to consumers and how to recognize and respond to consumer disputes, cease communication requests and consumers in bankruptcy, plus much more.
Read more on the FDCPA and ECST course redesigns in the January issue of Collector magazine. If you’re interested in being a part of evaluating education material and training opportunities, ACA’s Education Council is always looking for new members.
To learn more, email [email protected].
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