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There are many classes that Vale offers- auto, marine, and property among them.
I attended the 3 week course property line course in 2001. I already had a background in auto adjusting, but property was a new critter altogether!

For a new guy, with little to no experience, extensive training is required before ever being assigned a claim.

There are schools that offer courses that last several weeks and cost thousands of dollars. Schools like Vale cover the high points of adjusting: a week on policy, a week on product identification, and the last week split up with one day of safety, a couple of days of scoping, and another day or two practicing with an estimating program.
Vale is great- but they only touch the tip of the iceberg, leaving you unprepared to handle claims on your own.

If you want to be a storm adjuster, do your due diligence, checking out other adjusting schools as well. I heard the Pilot Catastrophe class was geared a little more toward storm adjusting, while the Vale class was mostly full of company claim reps.

Any school will give you a good foundation, but you won't be ready to handle losses on your own. Attempting to handle losses fresh out of school is fraught with peril. Building a solid reputation in the industry is vital. If your claims aren't up to par, you'll be sent home within a week or two, and that IA staffing firm may never send you back out again.

After attending a school, try to ride-along with and learn from a good adjuster. Preferably someone with 10 or more years of experience. If I found a nearby adjuster with 30 years of experience I'd ride with him in the off-season. In this business, we're always learning.

I am a long time property adjuster and I took the Automotive Estimatics 3000 course from Vale and I could write an auto estimate on 90% of the collisions with the training I received in class. I could not get into this course as soon as I wanted as I was told State Farm had filled the classes. When I took the class most of it most of my classmates were from an insurance company in Oklahoma.

I had over seven years staff adjuster experience with Crum & Forster and Farmers Insurance Group and another three years as an independent. I had nine years learning Xactimate snd I knew how to estimate damage. I learned how to adjust hurricanes from a State Farm Trainer in the Cat Office.

VALE will give you the background along with a four-year degree to get hired by by a P&C carrier where you will get the five years need before you go out on a hurricane.

New people , their you have it. It takes 10,000 hours, start today bu reading all the books you can find. Most of us have rease more than 10 books on basic insurance principals.

Posted By wuchun on 25 Oct 2010 03:56 AM
There are schools that offer courses that last several weeks and cost thousands of dollars. Schools like Vale cover the high points of adjusting: a week on policy, a week on product identification, and the last week split up with one day of safety, a couple of days of scoping, and another day or two practicing with an estimating program.

Vale is great- but they only touch the tip of the iceberg, leaving you unprepared to handle claims on your own.

If you want to be a storm adjuster, do your due diligence, checking out other adjusting schools as well. I heard the Pilot Catastrophe class was geared a little more toward storm adjusting, while the Vale class was mostly full of company claim reps.

Any school will give you a good foundation, but you won't be ready to handle losses on your own. Attempting to handle losses fresh out of school is fraught with peril. Building a solid reputation in the industry is vital. If your claims aren't up to par, you'll be sent home within a week or two, and that IA staffing firm may never send you back out again.

Hey Wuchun,

Any adjuster just out of school is not ready to start working claims regardless where they graduated from, but any Vale graduate will be way ahead of his/her peers when it comes to knowledge over any graduate from a 3 to 5 day training course.  

Sorry Robby, the post by Wuchun was a spam post, it had links in to other sites (non-adjusting) which I removed before approving the post, but I just noticed that it is copy of the post made by BeauKron. I'm going to remove the post and lock Wuchun's account.

I tell all my "sponcees" to attend Vale in California. Gene Hensley is the lead instructor and goes an awesome job teaching the newbees to understand what it means to hold the "smart" end of a tape measure!

In 1989  I worked with a small IA on  2 very large floods in Houston. He  paid to sent 4 kin folk to Vale just before Hugo in SC. They had a very good foundation and still follow storms. He always said it was the best investment he ever made.