University of Wisconsin Stout | Wisconsin's Polytechnic University

The Total Asset Protection Focus

In the past 30 to 40 years, the nature of the profession has significantly changed in that the "risk manager" is now responsible for identifying, analyzing and guiding the control of risks that are a threat to all of an organization's assets. This total asset protection focus is reinforced through information and experiences that students receive from UW-Stout's M.S. degree in Risk Control and parallels the Associate in Risk Management (ARM) certification through the American Institute for Charted Property Casualty Underwriters (AICPCU). Thus, the model at right helps explain the fundamental foci of Stout's M.S. in Risk Control program.

These assets:

• Are present and at risk within most organizations
• Must be considered with every management decision
• Can easily be downgraded as a result of accidents
• Should be used to help drive needed process changes

This risk control model emphasizes:  

1. How all of an organization's assets have money as the common denominator.
2. Management's need to consider how any given decision might impact (positively or negatively) all of their organization's assets.
3. How numerous assets can be downgraded as a result of workplace accidents.
4. The need to reference all of these assets when it comes to cost-justifying needed process changes.   

Recommended Employer Strategies to Assist Students in Completing Their Degree

There are times when an organization will either prompt a suitable employee to enroll into the M.S. degree in Risk Control, or else hire an individual who is in the final phase of completing this degree. Either way, it has occurred where the employed individual completes all of the required coursework, but fails to write the final research paper within the required seven year deadline and therefore does not receive the desired masters degree.

In order to prompt an employee to successfully complete all of the degree requirements, it is recommended that the employee and employer collaboratively write degree completion-oriented deadlines into the employee's annual professional development objectives.  This deadline system could be course-based or in the case of the final research paper, focus on sequentially completing Chapters one through five. The ultimate goal of this system should be to reward the employee for successfully completing incremental steps that bring the degree to completion.