What are the Different Types of Workers' Compensation Certification?

The workers' compensation industry spans multiple professions, including insurance, human resources, and risk management. There are several different kinds of workers' compensation certification, ranging from the general to the highly specialized. Professionals with the proper credentials who can offer their services to employers, insurance companies and brokers, and workers' comp claims adjusters can increase their employment opportunities. Several workers' compensation certification options exist to provide basic workers' compensation awareness. These programs are designed to allow attendees to maintain their proficiency in the field.

A program that allows attendees to become certified workers' compensation specialists can cover a a great deal of information, including topics like reinsurance and underwriting, workers' comp law, and claims handling. The breadth of such courses makes them ideal for many different professionals in the workers' comp insurance business, including underwriters, claims adjusters, premium auditors, human resource managers, loss prevention engineers, safety directors, and Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) compliance experts. These general workers' comp training programs offer more than just coursework. Typically, they can also offer tools and forms to help attendees implement lessons back on the job, along with benchmarking data and checklists that can help them gauge their progress.

For individuals who want to specialize in a particular aspect of the workers' comp field, there are several workers' compensation certification options. Coursework for becoming a certified injury prevention specialist is available, for example. This workers' compensation certification program might be ideal for professionals like safety directors or OSHA compliance officers, as well as for risk managers or workers' comp managers for employers that want to improve employee safety at their facilities.

Another workers' compensation certification program is to become a certified claims management specialist. This type of workers' comp training program makes sense for professionals like insurance adjusters, insurance agents, human resource managers, and in-house claims managers. These certification programs help workers' comp professionals learn the laws and the procedures for dealing with injured workers, including how to return employees to work more quickly and how to deal with the medical professionals involved in the claim.

For professionals involved with workers' comp insurance policies, a workers' compensation certification program in premium auditing might be useful. Qualified individuals for such programs include controllers and financial managers. Workers' comp insurance policies are complicated and are based on the number of claims reported by employers, how quickly these claims are closed, payroll data, and the industries that employers are involved in. Auditing such documents requires the specialized knowledge imparted by such a workers' compensation certification program.