How to run a two-week practicum for loan officers

Put the loan officer on a live lending queue for two weeks, deciding every application the agent holds, with an assessor marking each decision against the file. The bar: at least 95 correct decisions in every 100, and no missed red line such as a decline sent without specific reasons. The record of those decisions is the evidence for sign-off.

What does a lending practicum test that a course cannot?

A course can teach a loan officer what an affordability check is. It cannot show whether the officer will notice, at four in the afternoon on their thirtieth file, that the agent's affordability figure rests on income the applicant declared and nobody verified. That is the skill a practicum tests: judgement on real files, under real volume, with the record watching.

The head of lending owns the practicum because they own the credit policy and the mandate each officer holds. Credit risk sets the red lines with them. The guide to AI literacy and certification for people who work with agents explains where practical assessment sits alongside written tests, and the short definition of what a practicum is is a useful one-page brief for officers before they start.

What are the steps?

1. Person (head of lending): pick a queue with mixed outcomes. A queue that only holds approvals teaches nothing about declines. The agent should be working at depth 2 on offers and declines, drafting them for a person to send.
2. Person (credit risk): fix the red lines. For most lenders these are: approving above the officer's mandate, sending a decline whose reasons are generic or untrue, missing clear signs that the applicant is in financial difficulty, and approving on declared income where policy requires verified income.
3. Agent, depth 2: drafts the decision and its reasons. For each application the agent sets out the figures, the sources behind them and the reasons for its proposed outcome.
4. Agent, depth 3: requests documents within bounds. Payslips, bank statements and identity documents go out without waiting for the officer.
5. Person (officer): decides each held file. Approve, edit or decline. Every decline carries reasons the applicant could understand and the officer would defend.
6. Agent, depth 4: disbursement stays held. Releasing funds is hard to undo, so it waits for a named person even when the officer has approved the credit decision.
7. Person (assessor): marks every decision within a day. The assessor reads the file, not just the officer's note.
8. Person (assessor with head of lending): sign off or extend. An officer who reaches the bar with a pattern of weak reasons gets an extension, not a pass.

Which controls matter, and what evidence do they leave?

Mandate is enforced by the workspace, not by memory. The officer's approval limit sits in the customer's own limits, so an approval above mandate is held for a senior rather than relying on the officer to remember. The evidence is the verdict naming the limit that decided.

Every decline is checked for reasons. In many markets a declined applicant is owed specific reasons, including where a model shaped the decision. The assessor checks that each reason matches the evidence in the file. The evidence is the reason text alongside the assessor's mark.

Declared and verified figures are kept apart. The agent stamps each figure with its provenance. A marked error is an officer treating a declared salary as verified when policy needed a payslip.

Independent marking. The assessor is not the officer's line manager, and their name is on every mark.

What should the assessor measure?

• Accuracy against the bar: decisions marked correct out of all decisions.
• Red-line misses: zero, or the practicum ends.
• Override direction: whether the officer's edits consistently raise or lower the agent's proposed amounts. A one-way pattern is a calibration question worth discussing.
• Reason specificity: the share of declines where the assessor rewrote the reasons.
• Consistency: two similar applicants decided differently by the same officer, flagged for discussion.

Keep these in the practicum log template for loan officers, so the sign-off conversation starts from the same sheet the assessor kept.

Where do lending practicums usually go wrong?

Approvals only. A queue that rarely declines lets an officer pass without ever writing a decline reason. If live declines are scarce, replay past declined files in a training workspace and mark them as replayed in the record.

The officer trusts the agent's arithmetic. Agents are good at sums; they can still use the wrong input. Assessors should look for officers who never open the bank statement behind the income figure.

Vulnerability is missed because it is not a field. Signs that someone is struggling often sit in free text: a note about a recent bereavement, repeated gambling transactions, a request to borrow to repay another loan. The practicum must include at least a few such files.

The same structure carries across functions. The playbooks for compliance officers and procurement officers show how the red lines change while the method stays the same.

Where the Academy fits

Certified Pryme Operator includes exactly this kind of practicum: two weeks of real review decisions, at least 95 in every 100 correct and no missed red line, signed off by a Pryme assessor. Module tests are set in the learner's own industry and role, so a loan officer is assessed on lending files. A lender can choose to make the right to approve held credit decisions depend on a current certificate.