Australian Institute of Professional Brokers
Education

The Australian Institute of Professional Brokers promotes quality education and training at a reasonable and realistic cost.

AIPB is committed to advancing the skill and knowledge level of Finance Brokers through quality ongoing training and development.

A Finance Broker is expected to be skilled and knowledgeable. They need to demonstrate expertise and competence in money matters, economic matters, credit, credit products, calculations, relative legislation, diversity and communication, advice and advisers, risk and return, risk management, credit products, lender policy, property transactions, debt and equities market transactions.

A skilled and knowledgeable Finance Broker will allocate time in their schedule to continually refresh and upgrade their existing knowledge bank.

A Finance Broker in their role will:

	Assess the borrower's financial and life situation, and offer, if available from the finance broker's scope of operation, an appropriate solution to the borrower's perceived credit problems and
	Have access, via individual accreditation, to reputable credit providers who have appropriate products or
	Refer the client on to a suitably qualified and ethical professional that has access to the product that meets the consumers' needs.

To be successful in their role a Finance Broker needs more than what the Certificate IV in Finance Services (Finance/Mortgage Broking) asks them to be able to do.

A Finance Broker has two main functions:

	Providing advice or assistance to the borrower.
	Acting as an intermediary between the borrower and a credit provider.

To be successful in these two main functions a Finance Broker has to commit time and effort to courses, seminars and independent education.

A Vocational Education and Training (VET) system can produce competency for work and every day living. By improving their professional skills a Finance Broker will also improve their life skills. We encourage our Finance Brokers members to expand their resourcefulness and inventiveness by completing units in subjects such as bookkeeping, accounting, conveyance, risk, law and being human.

We support appropriate quality training via the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) which is the national set of standards that assumes nationally consistent, high-quality training and assessment via a Registered Training Organisation.

Professional Development is more than collecting PD points. It is a given for anyone who requires themselves to be known as a professional.

Professional development may be:

	Unstructured as in attendance of seminars, breakfasts, luncheons and corporate briefings/ show cases - these are considered as networking events
	Structured which is formalized and recognised up skilling education and training.

While there is no stipulation of a minimum number of professional development points for membership a combination of both structured and unstructured professional development is expected to be undertaken to retain membership.