Kristin Bridges

Director of Training and Development @Northwestern Mutual

Milwaukee, WI, US

Hired to launch and define newly created Director of Training & Development role. Directs onboarding, training, post-training, and development programs for incoming financial representatives (176–220 representatives yearly). Documents and reports training and production goals to senior leadership. Coordinates with external vendors to support training. Collaborates regularly with other senior leadership to share best practices and identify opportunities for streamlining and improvement. Ensures regulatory and legal compliance. Manages eLearning program and innovates additional learning resources to drive training goals.• Increased first-time pass rates on WI insurance licensure exam from 33% to 100% and reduced training costs by $60.52 per new hire by transitioning to a more effective eLearning program.• Boosted representative performance and timely program completion by piloting the provision of ongoing coaching, mentoring, and support for new representatives.• Significantly raised new hire retention by implementing communication protocols to report training progress and issues to and increase buy-in from leadership team (executives, mentors, advisors).• Improved company culture and morale through team-building and other initiatives, resulting in highly positive feedback from all levels of the company.• Enabled more effective knowledge transfer by developing multimodal training resources to support and augment instruction.• Planned and executed successful onboarding events to launch new representatives’ training.• Supported training initiatives by coaching and developing trainers to improve quality of instruction.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Bachelor of Science - BS