Erike Young, who has helped prepare more than 2,300 students for The Institutes’ Associate in Risk Management (ARM™) designation, talks with host Jenny Whittington about why the ARM designation is useful for higher education risk professionals, the new focus of the updated ARM, and what his Risk Management Study Group offers to students who are preparing for the tests. The Risk Management Study Group is available as a free benefit for URMIA members, including those who already earned the ARM and just want to brush up on new content.
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Erike Young, who has helped prepare more than 2,300 students for The Institutes’ Associate in Risk Management (ARM™) designation, talks with host Jenny Whittington about why the ARM designation is useful for higher education risk professionals, the new focus of the updated ARM, and what his Risk Management Study Group offers to students who are preparing for the tests. The Risk Management Study Group is available as a free benefit for URMIA members, including those who already earned the ARM and just want to brush up on new content.
Show Notes [member-only content, login required]
Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org
Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!
Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!
Jenny: Hello everyone and this is Jenny Whittington, URMIA’s executive director, and welcome to URMIAmatters. I have a special guest with me today, it’s Erike Young, and Erike partners with us on our Risk Management Study Group. So, welcome to the podcast, Erike!
Erike: Thanks, glad to be here.
Jenny: So, I’d love to start things out by just having people explain a little bit about your history and how you got involved with URMIA. I’ve known you for a long time. I can’t even speculate where I met you, but it’s been a while. We’ve known each other for a long time, so please give us a little bit of an introduction to your history with risk management.
Erike: Sure. Well, like many people, I kind of fell into the safety and risk management field. I worked at a grocery store and we had an inspection by our corporate office and next thing I know, I was put in charge as the safety coordinator for our store, and from there kind of fell in love with the safety world and eventually a position kind of opened up in the corporate office and joined as a regional safety specialist and six months into it a risk manager ended up leaving and so all of the sudden risk management responsibilities fell on the safety side of the house and I fell in love with it and started learning about the associate risk management and all the different designations that were out there, and eventually another position opened up the risk consulting service and I ended up taking on that as they started forming self-insured groups and I was actually with that company for seven years, and eventually did some consulting with the University of California, where I met Grace Crickette, and most people know Grace was with University of California and now she’s with Wisconsin, and she was really my mentor. I got the opportunity to do some consulting and got to kick the tires as their Environmental Health and Safety Director, and at that point University of California was starting their journey on enterprise risk, and got to learn from the best and got to serve as Deputy Director for enterprise risk, and that’s actually where we ended up meeting was there, and ended up spending about five years at University of California. Low and behold I got this weird email on LinkedIn, someone saying that they were looking for, hiring for a global safety manager for Google, and I thought it was a phishing scam, from the risk manager perspective. I didn’t click the link, but I did my own searches and found out that, yeah, they actually are looking for that position and I actually called that person and went ahead and applied, and about a week later I was told I had an interview and within two weeks, had an offer to join as their global safety manager, and did that for about four years, and one thing, as people know, Google -all over the place- but they think of it as just a search company, but as they are global and in 60 countries, and part of that responsibility was traveling to all the different countries where we had offices and the last year i was there, traveled about 100,000 miles.
Jenny: Oh my.
Erike: Being that part of risk management, it’s an expensive place to live. I actually traveled, my daily commute was six hours round trip train ride and after four years it was kind of enough and went back to my roots with the public sector and where I’m at now with Parsac Public Agency Risk Sharing Authority of California we’re a joint powers of insurance authority for about 35 small cities and still doing work with the Universities with URMIA as well as I’m very involved with ISO 31000 group in congress management and helping with the standards development process.
Jenny: Wow, that’s quite a history and I think Grace Crickette has been a mentor to many. I run into her from time to time and it’s always great to see Grace, so thanks for that shout-out to her. So, tell me a little bit about your history with ARM, when did you actually get your ARM?
Erike: Actually I don’t remember. What I can tell you was it’s more about how many versions it was. It was after they started doing the multiple choice exams and I want to say it was probably around 2003? No, 2005. And so, that’s when I think I got mine, and since then it’s gotten several iterations, and actually how I started teaching it was really the best way to learn it is to teach it and so with the risk consulting company that I was with ended up internally doing classes for ARM staff and then that grew into, we had an office in Los Angeles and they said “Hey, we’d like to join this new thing of doing webinars” and it got started way back when, and so I started doing that and someone said “hey, can you record these things?” “Sure.” Eventually it grew into where people started requesting them and instead of responding to emails, I said “you know, I’m just going to start a website and just make it easy for everyone.” So far I think I’ve had over, about 2300 students online take the course.
Jenny: Wow.
Erike: And if you figure the three courses that were there, so probably over 6000 classes have been taken by students over the last… The website only started about 5 years ago, so that’s pretty good for the last 5 years.
Jenny: That’s great. So, in my early years with URMIA, we’ve always had some kind of ARM review with our conference, and then we used to give a pen, or pencil, and paper (we were very strict about the pencils) exam and then we would have a proctor, and then that kind of, we couldn’t do that anymore, so you’ve been our instructor for several years bringing the ARM review course to our members, so we’ve just been thrilled to partner with you on this and the reason why we were having you as a guest today on the podcast is during this unprecedented time, while some people may have more time on their hands, they don’t have to commute or some other things that we miss doing these days, people are taking advantage of it and maybe doing some, you know, professional development. Can we go back to the beginning and you know, what your advice would be for somebody who is kind of new to risk management and I know there are a variety of designations out there, but the ARM is one that our board has always felt that it should be recommended to new people, can you tell us just a little bit about the designation, the requirements it needs over time?
Erike: Sure, so the ARM always, for the most part, consisted of three courses. In the past it was really more of a focus on risk assessment, risk treatment and risk financing are the three pillars that it’s built upon. With the recent changes to it, it’s now more global. It’s still the same foundation of those three things: risk assessment, risk treatment, and finance. So those are the three exams that a person would have to pass. Now, why I think it’s important in a good foundational area is that it does cover a broad section of topics, and whereas before it was really focused on insurance. So probably when you and I took it, even back probably to 2010, this was before ERM became, they thought it was maybe a flavor of the month, and so it evolved from really focusing on the hazard risk and now what the ARM is really about is how do you assess risk holistically from an enterprise level, not just the insurance aspect, and I think that’s really the key part is that for the longest time when we thought about risk in those types of things, we always thought about what type of insurance do we need to purchase or those types of things. Now we look at it with most of the risk we have is uninsurable, right, probably only 40% is insurable risk and when it comes to the reputational risk, strategic risk, and all those other types of things, think that’s really where we can use that designation and use the information within the course to really help our organization. I think it really does sets the table of how to think differently about risk and using also the things from ISO and COSO, all the standards that are out there, it does provide a really good framework and lays a foundation, and the other part id globally, the ARM is recognized. I know RIMS, the CRM, there’s other designations out there, but when you look at the one that’s really recognized almost anywhere, and you say you have your ARM, they know what that means.
Jenny: Sure. Is there a continuing education component for the ARM?
Erike: So, that’s one of the things that makes it unique compared to others, there is no continuing ed, so once you have it, it is for life. Obviously, we always want to encourage continuing education by going to URMIA and those conferences to spread that word, but one of the nice things is, it’s not one of those things where it’s a moneymaker, as some would say, where you have to continue taking courses just for the sake of taking courses.
Jenny: Very good. I know that was a big point to our Board of Directors early on, and my learning about the designations and the different things out there and the community, that that’s really important to members who don’t want to have that burden of a continuing education need, or the budget for it. So, I think it is terrific that they kept it that way. I think that’s wonderful. So, can you talk about how long it takes to study for each course? What’s your… I believe like back in the day we would start promoting it with our conference even like six months out. How long do you say it takes a person to get one of the tests?
Erike: So, the old course, prior to the recent revision, I would say about ten weeks is what you want to plan for. If you think about ten weeks that’s almost three months, so within the year you should be able to actually get your ARM. With the revision they’ve actually taken quite a bit of content out and simplified it. Where it used to be eleven chapters it’s now down to nine chapters for the course. And so I’ve actually moved that study time frame to about eight weeks. So actually the online course, when people decide to do the study group, we try to provide a structure that you pretty much study one chapter per week. Some of the chapters are smaller, so we try to tackle two chapters and at the very end we have a course summary that kind of goes over test taking tips, what is most likely going to be on the exam, and so I’d still say between eight to ten weeks. We do have some people, especially now, instead of binge-watching the latest Tiger King or whatever, you can binge-watch the webinars and I’ve had people actually take the entire webinar series in one week and actually pass the exam. So, I don’t recommend that, but for those that can do that certainly that is a way that people do it and other people take a little bit longer and it’s really designed to be on demand to fit within your schedule. So, if you want to get up at six a.m., you can do it. People need to download it. If someone emails me and says “Hey, I’m traveling” (obviously not now) but when they are traveling on a plane and there’s no wifi, I’ll give them the mp4 files so they can actually listen to or watch during that kind of dead time while they’re actually on a plane or other access where they don’t have wifi.
Jenny: Yeah, actually one of our board members, our current board member Pam Jeffreys from Tennessee, I think she told me that she listened to it in her car while she was commuting and she really enjoyed that flexibility. I’m sure there’s some that are more slide-dependent than others, but listening I think is a great option.
Erike: So, actually on that, which is funny, I’ve actually had people come up to me and they’ve never seen me, but they hear my voice and they go “You’re the guy who teaches the course, aren’t you?”, and it’s kind of funny when I go to a conference and I’ve heard that. I’ve heard other people talk about, yeah, they’ve listened to me in the car, which is kind of odd, and some require a little more slides, but a lot of it is just listening to the concepts. What I try to do is explain the textbook, and so even if someone listens first and then reads the textbook, that’ll help them learn what it’s about.
Jenny: That’s terrific. Well, anything else that you want to talk about, the revisions or any special shout-outs about the test itself?
Erike: Yeah, well I think while this is going on, one of the challenges that, from the testing standpoint, the institutes actually recently sent out an email to students that they can actually test virtually, meaning they can test from their home. Whereas before you had to go to prometrics or wherever the testing center, where it’s proctored. Well, those centers are closed now, and so they want to encourage people to take tests. What they recently did send out is for an unproctored exam, because technically you could still look at your notes, I think it’s a little more difficult. I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but the test now has to be completed in an hour. So, you can’t look up stuff online- makes it tougher. And it is still 65 questions, and the questions they are doing are applied questions. So, instead of asking for definitions, what I mean by applied- it’s a scenario. So you really have to understand the information, it’s not really about memorization at that point, it’s about how you would actually apply the information to be able to take that. I’ve had a couple students indicate that they’re going to try the virtual and they’ll get back to me. So once I hear back, I’ll send some notes out and we can get the word out about what that does look like. Otherwise, for those that may be waiting, and hopefully we can take the test in a month or two at a regular testing center, normally it would be two hours to take the exam, and about, you know the questions, you only get about 22 applied questions normally and then the 43 or whatever if I did my math correct would be the kind of direct memorization. You know- what’s the definition of risk, those types of questions. So, that’s probably one of the changes. The other thing I think is important to note, when they made some of the changes to the textbook, they took out references to ISO and COSO, which I thought was interesting. And so they really just want a generic brand of enterprise risk of what does holistic risk mean, and they have put more emphasis on the importance of communication in technology and how the new ARM 400 is called Risk in an Evolving World and the idea behind it is to really look at, things are changing quickly and how do we use technology and also I think the importance in how we communicate that to leadership that it’s not just the risk manager that’s doing risk anymore and that communication was seen with leadership and all the data all those types of things are all part of that, and the other big emphasis I would say between censors and big data, which they revised a little bit ago, a lot more discussion on blotching, technologies, and things like that. So, when you start reading some of this a lot of times, we might be going, “wow, what’ this blotching thing?” and we hear about it more. There’s so much more happening now and I think they’re trying to get ahead of the game of knowing what’s down the road, and so that when we start hearing that information as risk managers we’re aware and know how to use it better. But. that’s probably the main thing from a change standpoint, and you know, take advantage of the resources that URMIA is providing with the study group. I enjoy always teaching the course actually at the conference level but at the same time to be able to do it online on your own time. You know, it can be expensive, but our goal is really trying to promote professional development, and do it at a low cost, and especially those working at public entities and universities. Cost can always be challenging, so we want it affordable and reachable for students.
Jenny: I mean yeah, more than ever, I think these are going to be trying times for the whole higher education marketplace for the next couple years. So, URMIA is happy to provide this member benefit and we are so happy to have you, Erike, that does this. I know one thing Louise and I talked about in our office when we were talking about how to kind of market the revival of the series with you was to even market it to people who already have their ARM. You know, why not refresh their skulls, because it sounds like there’s a lot of fresh content out there, and I know a lot of people who got their ARM a few decades ago. It might be a good time to take out a little brush up.
Erike: And actually to that point, so besides the designation, the old content, the old ARM 54 and ERM 57 and RMPE 352, which is the public entity risk management, even though those designations technically you can’t test for them, I have actually kept those on an archive section. So, for those that just want to do some professional development on their own, you can still access all of that with all the information. There’s no login required or no signups or waivers required. I’m still providing that because I think it is important, like you said, whether you already have the designation and you just want to brush up on some new techniques or something, or maybe you’ve never taken the ? risk and you want to see what that’s all about. It’s worth taking a look at that as well.
Jenny: That’s great. So, people that have the ARME, will they still be able to get that?
Erike: Unfortunately not, so ARMP and the ARME are basically those people, whoever has those designations, they’re the last ones to receive that. I think part of the change, whether, two things,
the ARME, part of the reason they discontinued that or also why they started it, is really because of the people that have that ARM from 20 years ago to give them an opportunity to basically advance and to get that new information, and with the new courses, even the ARM 54, the most recent one, really was covering enterprise risk. And so, it kind of served its purpose for the last couple years, but the new content is all about enterprise risk and covers that information. On the ARMP, the downside with that one is maybe only 20 people a year probably tested for it, and the textbook was, I think, published over 20 years ago, and was never updated. Things don’t evolve that much in public entities, and also the reality is that, from a risk management perspective, whether is public entities or private, a lot of the techniques that we really use are the same. There’s some unique things about police and fire, some of the things that public entities have to do, but how we evaluate, and treat, and finance risk is going to be pretty much the same. There’s some interesting chapters in the RMPE 352 that I think would be helpful for those that go beyond and actually now that we’re online I think.. I’ll maybe pull some of those out and.. People are posting on facebook the top 10 albums that influenced you, maybe I’ll pull out the chapters that even if you’re on your own, what are some of the recordings that might be of best use to you in your downtime.
Jenny: That’d be kind of fun, and you could have your students vote on the best ones.
Erike: Yeah, social media. We’ll make it work.
Jenny: Well, thank you so so much for being my guest today. We got this together very quickly; I really appreciate you being flexible. Thanks so much for being my guest, and this is it for URMIAmatters. Thank you!
Erike: Thank you.