BRYAN JOHNSTON

Bryan is a very well known trainer and consultant and coach particularly within Financial Services.

He specialises in combining technical knowledge with interpersonal skills and provides a variety of technical, customer service, sales, motivational and regulatory programmes.

Bryan is very well known to students of the QFA courses (Qualified Financial Adviser) and has received much praise for his enthusiastic and lively delivery of this now mandatory course for Financial Professionals.His background is in Life Assurance where he started as a very successful broker consultant and his career included roles as sales manager, Sales training manager and other senior manager roles with Irish Progressive.

His company merged with Irish Permanent and Bryan was promoted to Head of Organisation Development –, where he acted in a business consultancy role with various functions and subsidiaries within the Group, including Irish Progressive, Irish Permanent Finance, and the branch network. During this period he was involved in ensuring that line managers were fully trained and conversant in Best Management Practices; recruiting and managing a team of training officers to deliver sales and technical training to the branch network.

Bryan would describe himself as a salesman and he has always been a keen and passionate advocate for salespeople and their development.

He has always been closely involved with education and was a Board member of the LIA (Life Association of Ireland) for many years and was President of LIA in 2001.

Bryan is still actively involved with the LIA as an editor of its magazine The Professional and is a frequent contributor to this and other industry publications and is well known for his book reviews.

He is a member of the Professional Speakers Association and a frequent visitor abroad and particularly to India and Sri Lanka where he has spoken at the Sub Continents version of MDRT a record four times. Many of his talks and ideas are a dynamic mix of East and West.

He has developed many other courses  over the past few years including The Financial Adviser’s Assistant Traineeship curriculum from scratch for FAS and has assisted in its training programme with the Fitzwilliam Institute.

A keen Sportsman too Bryan has completed 6 marathons and included in his travels to India in 2005 a hurling exhibition close to the Taj Mahal