Before You Can Train, You Need Something to Train On

Training on your Epic means training on your specific workflows, your procedures, your naming conventions, your activity structure. If those things don’t exist in writing, there is nothing consistent to train on. You’ll train people on informal habits: whatever the last experienced person happened to do. Those habits will vary by who’s doing the teaching.

The word “hopefully” is doing a lot of work in a phrase that comes up repeatedly in conversations about Epic training: you want new staff to know how you want them to work in your system, according to your hopefully developed workflows. Many agencies reach the training conversation without having written anything down first.

The prerequisites for functional Epic training are:

Written procedures. Procedures set expectations for timing, responsibility, and documentation requirements. When should you invoice after binding? What’s the turnaround on a cancellation release? Who follows up on a pending endorsement, and by when? These answers need to be documented somewhere outside Epic before a trainer can teach them.

Written workflows. Workflows are the step-by-step actions inside Epic (and any supporting tools) that fulfill those procedures. Applied provides boilerplate workflows at go-live. Most agencies customize them. Either way, they need to exist in writing, be accessible to staff, and be specific enough that compliance can be measured.

Configured and Optimized Epic. Training someone on a system that hasn’t been deliberately configured is training them on defaults. If your Activity Codes haven’t been cleaned up, if your Policy Types are still generic, if your events haven’t been selectively enabled, training will teach people to work around a system that doesn’t reflect how your agency operates.

Get these in place before onboarding a new employee. The training conversation changes substantially when there’s a defined target to train toward.

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What “Applied Epic Training” Actually Means

When an agency first goes live on Epic, Applied sells training alongside the implementation. It covers Epic screens, standard functionality, and basic operations for admins, account managers, and other end users. Applied University offers a library of self-paced content for new users who have never opened the system.

That’s the surface answer. The real answer is that generic Epic training and agency-specific training are two different things; confusing them is where most training programs break down.

Even an experienced Epic user must be trained on your instance. The Activity Codes, the Policy Types, the expected way to document a carrier conversation, the naming conventions on attachments: all of it differs between agencies. An experienced hire arrives with habits from somewhere else. Your job is to replace those habits with yours.

You can’t really trust new people know how to do everything in your Epic system, because Epic is so configurable, so customizable per agency.

Regardless of how much Epic experience someone brings, you need to train them on your workflows and your procedures. That’s not optional. That’s the training.

Who Actually Does the Training

The honest picture of who delivers training in most agencies is less structured than anyone would like to admit.

Smaller agencies typically don’t have a dedicated trainer. What they have is the buddy system: a new employee is paired with one of your best people, who then shoulders the responsibility of walking them through how things work. On paper, this is mentorship. In practice, it slows down your highest-performing staff, produces inconsistent results depending on who the buddy is, and generates no documentation that training happened.

Mid-size agencies may have someone whose role includes training, but that person also manages their own book. Training is a second job. When things get busy, it’s the second job that gives.

Larger agencies tend to have dedicated trainers or a structured training function. They’ve developed onboarding processes for new Epic users, run ongoing lunch-and-learn sessions, cover specific topics on a recurring schedule, and sometimes bring in Applied or a third-party consultant to supplement.

The threshold for hiring a dedicated trainer is around 75 employees. Below 50, upper-level account managers can absorb new hire training. Above 75, the volume of onboarding, refresher sessions, and ongoing workflow management exceeds what a part-time training responsibility can handle. At 200 employees, you need two. The ratio is roughly one dedicated trainer per 75 to 100 people.

The trainer should not manage a book. This is the structural mistake that sabotages the role. A trainer managing their own accounts has divided attention on a good day. When their book gets busy, training becomes less of a priority. Their performance gets assessed partly on production, which pulls focus toward servicing and away from training sessions that don’t show up on a revenue report. The result is a training function that exists on paper and functions erratically in practice.

Why Trainers Matter for Your Revenue

Agencies that cut trainers during a budget squeeze tend to frame it as a straightforward call: trainers don’t generate revenue, so they’re easier to eliminate than producers or account managers. The problem is that it’s simple math, which lacks nuance.

Better-trained staff are more productive. They work faster, make fewer errors, and spend less time figuring out what they’re supposed to do. When the trainer disappears, that edge to productivity and E&O safeguards fades. New hires get lost, people start neglecting workflows, and your E&O exposure increases as a result.

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The Onboarding Checklist: What Actually Needs to Happen

Before any training conversation, a new Epic user has to be properly configured in the system. This is a multi-step process that touches several distinct areas of Epic. An incomplete setup creates downstream problems that are difficult to diagnose.

Most agencies have some version of an onboarding request or checklist. For Epic specifically, this covers:

Employee record setup. Name, address, contact details, license numbers. Epic has three license fields per employee. The employee record has to exist before you can create the login, because the user is associated with the employee record. If you add the login first, you’ll have to come back and edit it.

Security groups vs. individual permissions. Most agencies manage security at the group level rather than assigning rights to individuals. When adding a new user with the same role as an existing employee, you can copy the security group from that employee rather than building from scratch.

Structure configuration. Two distinct pieces need to be clear. “Structure” under security controls what the employee can access. Structure at the employee level determines where they’re available in the agency hierarchy. Conflating these creates access problems that show up later as activity visibility errors or servicing constraints.

Activity visibility and permissions within a team. If this employee is part of the commercial lines team in a specific office, whose activities can they see? This is configured at employee level and affects how work is distributed and monitored.

Signatures. If they’ll be issuing certificates or other proofs out of Epic, whose signatures can they use?

Office 365 and single sign-on. Most agencies are on Epic Browser, which uses single sign-on with O365. Their network login is their Epic login. This has to be in place before they can do anything.

IT onboarding as a separate track. Training on Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, the phone system, scanning procedures, and how the agency manages file storage is distinct from Epic training and needs its own process. Somebody has to cover it. Without a plan, it falls through the cracks.

Getting all of this right before day one of Epic training matters. Configuration gaps in a new user’s setup create confusing experiences during training, and those gaps tend to persist. We’ve covered impactful Applied Epic optimizations in a separate post.

Ongoing Training: Why the First Session Is Never Enough

Initial training decays. People learn something, apply it for a while, and then drift toward shortcuts on tasks they do every day and think they have memorized.

For instance, the endorsement workflow has 13 steps. Experienced staff working an endorsement know the core steps: document it, request it from the carrier, follow up, process it in Epic. What they skip are the less prominent steps: documenting the discussion with the insured, recording who they spoke to, noting what was communicated and when. Those steps feel minor until an E&O claim comes in two years later and you need to prove what was said and to whom.

Refresher training exists specifically to address this drift. What that looks like in practice:

Workflow reviews. Walk a department through a specific workflow once a year, or once a quarter for high-volume processes. Not as a corrective measure, but as a routine. The goal is to confirm that everyone is working from the same version of the workflow, especially if changes were made during the year.

Topic-specific sessions. Lunch and learns, brief remote sessions, or self-led modules with a quiz component. Pick a recurring problem area: attachment notes, activity status management, stage updates on service summary rows. Run a session on it.

Change communication with effective dates. When a workflow changes, you can’t just update the document and assume people notice. You need to announce the change, provide training on what’s different, and set a clear effective date. Changing workflows too frequently creates its own problems, because staff lose track of which version is current.

If you’re not providing training and not setting expectations, people are going to fail. Employees need to be aware, in advance, how their performance is evaluated, otherwise it feels like cheating on the agency’s side.

The telephone game is a useful frame here. Training delivered person-to-person, without a defined curriculum and a consistent trainer running sessions, changes with every pass. By the time it reaches your newest hire, it may not resemble the original procedure at all.

Training, Audits, and Accountability: How These Connect

Training and auditing operate as a system. You can only hold people accountable for expectations they’ve been taught and acknowledged.

This is why the training record itself matters as much as the training content. What was covered, when, and the employee’s acknowledgment that they understand and will comply: this functions almost like an employee handbook, but specific to Epic workflows. It’s the paper trail that makes accountability meaningful and defensible.

Employees should know from day one that audit compliance is part of performance reviews. This isn’t punitive. It’s an honest statement of how the job is measured. Once an employee has completed training and acknowledged the workflows, every part of those workflows becomes an expectation. Audit findings become a direct reflection of how well they’re meeting it. Tying this to performance evaluations removes ambiguity: the workflow isn’t optional guidance, it’s the standard the role is measured against.

The trainer can double as an auditor. A dedicated trainer without a book has the time, the workflow knowledge, and the operational independence to conduct audits fairly. This is the most practical arrangement for agencies that can’t justify a separate full-time auditor. What it requires is that the trainer role remain protected: not absorbed back into servicing, not burdened with a book. This works best when the trainer role is genuinely protected. An overextended trainer will struggle to balance both responsibilities.

Training without enforcement doesn’t hold. Implementing workflows without the training and audit infrastructure to support them may actually increase E&O exposure rather than reduce it. You’ve defined expectations. If you’re not training people to meet them and not verifying that they’re met, you’ve created a compliance gap you’ve officially acknowledged you should be closing.

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A Note on Acquisitions and Post-Merger Onboarding

Everything described in this article gets harder when the employees being onboarded are coming in through an acquisition. The timelines are compressed. The incoming staff are learning a new system under deadline pressure.

There’s a practical wrinkle that catches agencies off guard: training in Epic happens in sample databases, not production. User rights don’t transfer between databases, which means every person doing training in a sample needs their security and structure access configured separately. For a large incoming agency with many staff to train, that’s a significant hidden labor cost that sits entirely on the acquiring agency’s Admin Team.

Agencies that underestimate this tend to discover the gap after go-live, when the pressure to get people productive is already at its peak.

The next section covers the admin infrastructure that makes this manageable.

Onboarding Is a Test for Your Enterprise Admins and Epic Configuration

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in Epic during employee onboarding. Training governs what people do from today forward. It doesn’t touch the data that bad past practices left behind.

Every new employee you onboard is a live test of how well your Epic is actually configured.

Structure Groups that don’t reflect how the agency operates, Policy Types that are still generic: all of these issues stay invisible until you notice something is wrong in reporting, or Employee configuration.

Enterprise Admins in Applied Epic handle Employee Configuration, and things like Workload Reassignments, Structure Group management, View Others permissions. Natively, many of these are done record by record, tab by tab. Adding 200 new employees, reassigning a retiring producer’s book across 1,000 policy lines, or restructuring which employees can see whose activities: each of these is a significant time investment without the right tooling.

RecordLinker gives your Enterprise Admins a bulk-friendly interface that syncs directly with Applied Epic. What takes days of individual record updates takes hours. You can bulk-create employees, reassign entire servicing teams, manage View Others across your full team, and approve changes before they sync to Applied Epic:

  • Employee Configuration. Bulk-create or edit employees. Configure settings across hundreds of records in one go instead of tab by tab.
  • Structure Groups Management. Centrally review and bulk-edit structures. Spot employees whose structure settings deviate from your presets without checking individual accounts.
  • Workload Reassignments. Reassign an entire servicing team when a producer retires or changes role. Split reassignments across multiple employees and review exactly what changes before anything syncs.
  • View Others Permissions. Build a full relationship matrix for your team and push View Others configurations for tasks, activities, and workflows in a single operation.
  • Data Conversion. Easily convert data from acquired systems, generate full OldNew file or design custom conversion logic without SQL joins.

RecordLinker makes sure your agency is prepared to take in Employees smoothly and manage day-to-day configuration changes at scale. Training sets the standard for individual work.

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