How should you staff and train a centralised estimating team?

Staff production, acceptance review and exception handling separately in the capacity model—even if individuals share roles. Do not assume every experienced adjuster will produce at the same rate, or that software certification demonstrates competence across all loss types.

An Allstate virtual-property-adjuster posting reviewed for this research combines photograph-based estimating with policy interpretation, coverage investigation, negotiation and settlement. That is a useful warning for role design: an existing “virtual adjuster” job description can contain materially broader authority than a production-only role. (allstate.jobs)

What competencies should you assess?

Use a practical assessment covering:

• Construction and repair-scope reasoning for the selected claim population.
• Measurement and quantity calculations.
• Estimating-platform operation.
• Evidence sufficiency and uncertainty identification.
• Carrier-specific requirements.
• Clear factual narratives.
• Exception routing and authority limits.
• Revision discipline and version control.

Verisk offers three levels of Xactimate user certification focused on product knowledge and proficiency. Cotality’s training catalogue includes foundational Workspace/Estimate instruction and diagramming and estimating skills. Use those resources as part of training, then require carrier-specific calibration and supervised work. (verisk.com)

What should the training sequence look like?

A proposed sequence is:

1. Orientation: scope, authority, security and claim-record obligations.
2. Platform practice: synthetic examples with known answers.
3. Evidence exercises: incomplete, contradictory and misassigned source material.
4. Carrier calibration: producers and reviewers apply the acceptance pack to the same cases.
5. Supervised production: every pilot output reviewed before release.
6. Individual authorisation: permitted file types and escalation conditions recorded.

Verisk’s official XactXpert video demonstrates real-time estimating alerts and bypass notes. It can support tool training, but a cleared alert should not replace substantive evidence review. (youtube.com)

Exit gate: each producer demonstrates competence on the approved claim types; each reviewer can explain why a file passes, fails or requires escalation.