 How challenging is it for one to start this up-skilling process because some people will say you'll hear people say no I haven't done school in such a long time so they feel you know it gets it's going to be tedious for them and they're not going to be able to cope. Talk to us through the challenges and what are some of those things that the people could do to overcome them. Okay so some of the challenges it's very common so for example we don't see them as pitfalls at all but we more see them as like restraints so a lot of the time you're soloing care for to somebody and they'll say to you how many hours a day do I need to study and that's something that is impossible for me to answer because you know I can have two learners sitting at a table and I'll never forget they both had to answer the same question one took two hours and the other person took 30 minutes so it really depends on the person's knowledge that they've gained their experience their dedication to it. Good evening and welcome to the private property podcast right here on our Facebook page thank you so much for joining us it is a weekday and it's 7 p.m. so you know what we what time it is it's time for us to talk anything and everything property so tonight I have two special guests who are going to talk to us about how to up-skill and improve your property knowledge as you know this is the one of the reasons why we have this podcast to bring you on the past information and to help you to up-skill your knowledge and your skills so Courtney and Janet are joining us tonight from proper Academy Courtney and Janet good evening hi good evening to me thank you for having us on the show and I just can't hear you just give me a minute there can you guys hear me I can hear you perfectly perfect I can hear you now so let's just really jump into the conversation tonight and let's talk reskilling up-skilling what does this mean and how does it look when we are in an industry such as property okay so sorry I'll explain the difference between the two and then jank and jump in a little bit so we've got reskilling which is something that we do throughout our career so as we go through our day to day jobs we get a new duty something's added on child is to do this is your daily work life so you're constantly having to reskill as you go through and you can do that with some courses like your CPT courses skill enhancing courses that we've got whereas when you look at up-skilling that's more like when you've done your compulsory studies and you want things to get a promotion we're looking at your higher qualifications so up-skilling is more when you're putting that extra effort into getting your higher qualification so from your in-care for you would then go to your in-care five you can even go to in-care level six and facilities manager or you can side jump into commercial property management but that's when you're actually doing something in order to grow with a higher education use them and I'll really throw this question to Courtney and say with the new technological advancements that you guys are seeing how different has the your offerings your training offerings and your up-skilling and reskilling offerings been for for the different players in the market. So when lockdown happened everybody freaked out completely and I think Pop Academy was the only really excited company because we finally got to do everything online you know we're not wasting reams and reams of paper and having our learners send three or four files through Postnet so from that point of view we were very blessed to have got our learning CETA certification and we put everything on to a new platform we've actually been through two platforms because of them allowing us to do more and more online and it's been such a great learning curve for all of us what the nice thing is is if you are busy answering a question you can push save and you maybe haven't finished the next five questions but you need to go into a meeting so you don't have to worry about a thing you can come back later carry on and once you happy you can push submit and only once you submit your assessors also answering I mean walking your work online so from that point of view it's just been amazing it has been a learning curve and the older agents have surprised us by their willingness to actually get this kind of you know take on this challenge it hasn't scared them as much and you know the younger guys they used to have the iPad at school they come out of school so they're very on top they're on top form but we've also got a good support channel to help everybody through these new learning challenges but it is way better and so from that point of view from a technology point of view I see it just as us absolutely improving a little bit more you I like the fact that you would you were touching on the adoption you know in terms of people coming in and actually using these technological advancement so is are there any specific systems that have improved your the offerings that that may be whether either paid or free services that people can take advantage of if you if someone is watching us tonight and really wants to to upskill themselves and wants to learn these new skills are they any are they any specific ones that you can mention that one can start taking advantage of immediately of course all of our courses start when the learners read you so that's one of the things that proper Academy is very proud of and we are property practitioners and always have been I think since I was seven my mom had me working on sites on a off-site development trying to help with sales agreements so what happened was when all of the the regulations came through that we had to start studying you could take a week off of your sales for that month because you were spending so much time in class trying to get your studies done so now with it all being online I mean if somebody was interested in doing a course say that you are not an estate or a broker or an estate agent property practitioner and you just want to see you know you're obviously selling your house and they might be doing it personally and there's a few things you need to look out for you can go into our skill enhancing courses they're really affordable and they give you excellent information and you can pick any of them and as soon as your payment reflects you get started straight away thank you so much for that you know so informative if you just joined us we are talking how to upskill and improve your property knowledge and I'm joined by Courtney McKenna who's the operations manager at Prop Academy as well as Janet Alexandra who is the director at Prop Academy thank you so much for tuning in and thank you so much for coming through on the socials we see those those different green hearts coming through and everybody sharing how much this this information is so precise and is right what they needed so through the week we asked everyone on on Facebook to come through on the poll and the poll we had have you always wanted to improve your property knowledge and of course it was a given everybody said yes but they they did not know where to start and I think that is where I'm going to to pick it again Janet to say where does one start with with this what in terms of which course or which which offering do I take you know I am I don't know how to upskill myself I don't know where to go where do I start what is that offering that I can say this is the one whether online or on site you know to me Courtney does this all day long I'm going to pass it over to her okay so it's a brilliant question that you have and it's actually directed at two target markets again you've got your property practitioner who's wondering you know I've got my fidelity fund certificate what do I do next what do I need to do first of all we'll definitely advise you if you go into the proper Academy website and you click on the contact us page you can send us your details and we'll phone you in the morning and go through it with you but what's nice about that contact us page is it it also has two new videos that we've put on recently and the one video is for somebody who has a fidelity fund certificate and wants to know what is their next step and the other video is for somebody who wants to get into the industry but wants to be ahead of the pack you know they want to wait until they've got a job because it's really tough out there to get a job if you don't have any sort of certificates behind your name in real estate so for the guys who have nothing behind their name and they're still trying to get a job you'll kick them off with the logbook knowledge course okay you don't need a fidelity fund certificate to do it and it's a brilliant stepping stone into the NQF level four now both of those will be compulsory down the line so as soon as they get the FFCs those will be compulsory for them so they're actually just getting it out the way so that when they do start working they can actually make money selling or renting or doing whatever they do instead of studying and then for the guys who do have their FFCs it's your standard three steps you've got your intern logbook that you need to do you've got your NQF level four in real estate that you need to do and then your PDE for exam and all of that needs to be done in a total of 24 months your logbook needs to be done in the first 12 months and where we also advise them to do your NQF four and then you've got your extra 12 months to write and pass your PDE for so we know in the industry there's been a lot of confusion as to the new regulations and how they're going to affect us that is far away we wouldn't put it out there and as we believed Janet is luckily on the board helping design the new material so for now as it as it stands and for the next at least 12 months you're going to be doing the same path of your logbook NQF four and PDE four that's to become a proxy practitioner. A couple of episodes ago we spoke on the podcast on how an estate agent can really pivot their career and make more sales you know and I believe that upskilling and reskilling is one of those ways that they'll be able to make more sales. What are the other advantages that come with upskilling and reskilling yourself from perspective of you being in the industry and being a practitioner already? What are those things that help you to become better at your work? So I found because like I mentioned earlier we are property practitioners and I'll never forget walking in a property with somebody who wants to purchase that's a purchaser and we were walking through and I have just been through so much knowledge so many courses and I have a mother who's been in real estate forever so constantly knowing about real estate and when I was talking to the clients I remember that he was a CA and he asked me a financial question and I was able to answer him correctly and it was almost as if he was testing me and I think what I've always learned from that is the more you know, this is a normal saying knowledge is power but the more you know then you gain that trust of your clients and once you've done that they will come back to you time and time again for advice if it's to buy to rent for their friends referrals so for me part of upskilling is yes great you know the knowledge but just also having that confidence to go out there and sell or rent more and really the confidence is important because at the end of the day it's sales and that's one of the things that Janet said earlier that this is at the core of it it's really sales and I want to now jump into the biggest challenges because we know nothing really comes easy not everything has its challenges how challenging is it for one to start this upskilling process because some people will say you'll hear people say no I haven't done school in such a long time so they feel you know it gets it's going to be tedious for them and they're not going to be able to cope and talk to us through the challenges and what are some of those things that the people could do to overcome them okay so some of the challenges it's very common so for example we don't see them as pitfalls at all but we more see them as like restraints so a lot of the time you're selling in care for to somebody and they'll say to you how many hours a day do I need to study and that's something that is impossible for me to answer because you know I can have two learners sitting at a table and I'll never forget they both had to answer the same question one took two hours and the other person took 30 minutes so it really depends on the person's knowledge that they've gained their experience their dedication to it so we do battle with trying to help with time management which is why we have a course on our side as well for time management because everybody's life is different somebody might live with their grand their times are different somebody might have five people in their home they can't find quiet time so everybody's got those challenges to look at but what they've just got to do is find out what works for them and then stick to it and for us the most common solution and a lot of our learners have said it to us is just to make sure no matter what happens you complete one full question a day so if it's question one a b and c no matter what happens that is what you need to do some people want to start off with it before they open their laptop and look at work because we know what happens once that happens you just get so into it so um that's one of the challenges is also just to be self disciplined enough in order to do that you've got to make personal sacrifices in order to get your qualification because you might now have less personal time with your family and work sacrifices and then the last one that we have is obviously your cost of your qualification so not everybody has you know a seven or eight grand lying in the bank and found to do their national qualifications so what we do offer is um we offer EFT debit or credit card payments and then we've gone a step further and we've um let uh pages now offer their service on our website as well so that they can break their payments into three months if they do qualify for it and um it just helps a lot of a lot of people so that is not one bulk payment i was thinking at the top of my mind was already choosing you know choosing the right provider choosing the right 100 percent choosing 100 percent you know that about one seventh of our learners are actually redoing their course because they chose price over quality um so then they end up buying their course through the cheaper provider and like you say actually choosing the course they've been advised incorrectly or they decided to purchase incorrectly without advice and they've gone down this route they've realized they're on the wrong course so that's also why we're very specific with our clients if they are going to buy we have checklists to make sure they really are on the right step right from the beginning because you don't want to have those problems down the line um an excellent thing we also do is called an agency assessment so if you have an agency and you've got five agents or 50 agents you send us specific information and we will tell you what that learner needs to do when they need to do it buy and how much time they have because we know what we're doing and um often your problem comes about where the the learner will say to you i need x you need to double short make sure that they really do need that course so many providers and so many so much information i mean we live in the in the age of big data so a lot of times it gets so difficult for someone to choose the right thing at the right time yes and also sometimes they could they could be exempted for you know for the court quite often people are doing a course when they're actually exempted for it and some people opt for that they say you know i know i'm exempt but i want the knowledge from the course because i've never been in real estate that's up to them but as long as they understand what the options are right from the beginning sure no thank you so much for that um i i just want to bring janet back in here and ask um let's talk about how the delivery and the mode of some of the the courses that you offer how do they look and i i know that um i know that we also just spoke a bit about um how one can really manage their time but let's let's talk a practical experience of somebody who's already in the course or who's looking out for the course how does it look for them okay so basically um what has happened is the education has been recently legislated with at the board and it was legislated in 2008 i think it was that all agents had to become compliant in education and this was quite a big step for for agents that had been in the marketplace for some time and it resulted in them gradually buying their course and they bought it not for the knowledge that they could attain from the course but because of the requirement of legislation so that in itself was was a bit of a problem but what we have done with our courses and it's quite amazing because when we started we um art as proper academy our um focus was on e-learning and online delivery and where everybody else was focusing on the classroom and the blackboard and the chalk and the chalk duster or whatever that thing it's called so we were totally into e-learning and what we did is we have designed our courses so that they are simple for our learners our learners go onto our platform and they will go through each module and each module will first have an explainer video it will have the learning manual that they can learn from it will have quizzes the quizzes are in the form of multiple choice um and true and you know true and false types of questions and then there are assignments as well um so our courses are very very easy to manoeuvre through and um our learners are just loving it I'm glad I'm really glad that everyone is loving it because you don't really want to go into um uh starting a qualification and it's absolutely grueling for you thank you so much for that um any advice that you would give um different property players and both of you can really come in here as well to say what advice would you give um to property players people who are in different categories in terms of uh buyers sellers uh people who are in bond convincing and the different ones what what uh advice would you give them about upskilling and reskilling in the in the field do it we've got you you have you have to you can't go into these things blindsided you can get um you really can get taken advantage of and um my very little bit of advice I'll let Jenna take over but do the short courses do the skill enhancing courses gain that little bit of advice and knowledge and then always remember when you're purchasing a course from if you have more questions about it we all property professionals so you just give us a shout and we can advise you further and that's also aimed at people who aren't agents um but just take the time to do it properly my advice is that as an agent out there um you have to earn the trust of your clients I think Courtney said that previously and now to do that you should have a wild a wide array of knowledge now what we're offering over and above the residential courses our commercial property management course and that gives you an insight into that commercial space and um it's well worthwhile doing that type of course we've also got facilities management courses there for the facilities managers out there for the portfolio managers out there there is no better thing than knowledge honestly if you want to earn the trust of your clients if you want to be the cream of the crop as an estate agent or property practitioner you need the knowledge and as we've been saying throughout the episode tonight knowledge is power but knowledge executed is even more powerful Courtney can you just talk to anyone who's watching and who's prospective students to where can they find you guys and what would they be coming for like what are your top or flagship programs that you are currently offering so we offer everything from the start to the end which is why we do what we do okay so you can go all the way from internship to full uh so property practitioner or principal property practitioner and then everything on the sides your cpd is your extra knowledge courses your fico your ppr a so we give you we've made it we've developed our company to make sure that we're not just selling you one course we're looking after you throughout your entire real estate career and as new things happen we are making sure that we're the first to get out there with the correct information put it into a course for your staff and handed out subscribe to our website on our website you'll see a little subscribe button subscribe to the news and updates because we won't be the first to tell you what happens but we'll be the first to tell you the the truth in what is happening so we won't rush out they will make sure everything is perfect and and advise them if anybody wants to know which courses to do what we've done is on our website we have a contact us button which I spoke about earlier all you have to do is send us your details and then in the morning we will call you and we'll go through it verbally discuss what your needs are and then after that we'll send you an email to confirm everything and assist you through the entire process all right thank you so much ladies for taking our time to talk to us today and giving us such important information that the the facebook family and everybody listening to us can actually action in in order to upskill themselves and gain that knowledge around the property industry thank you so much and enjoy your evening thank you thank you it's definitely a pleasure thank you so much and just like that we have reached the end of our conversation tonight in our episode thank you so much for joining us and staying to to the actual end of the conversation tonight thank you so much and have an absolute splendid evening till the next time we see you right here on the private property podcast have a good one