John Hancock Retirement Plan Services (RPS) has introduced the John Hancock Education Resource Center, a website and materials ordering portal, designed to help plan sponsors, plan consultants and financial representatives educate and motivate employees about planning for retirement.

"Plan sponsors want their employees to maximize the effectiveness of their retirement plan. For many years, John Hancock has been a leader in providing top quality retirement readiness education and tools and now we've made it even easier for plan sponsors to access the wealth of programs and materials we have," said Andrew Ross, senior vice president of Marketing, John Hancock RPS. "We've given all of our 47,000+ plan sponsors, as well as the plan consultants and financial representatives that we work with, an easy and intuitive way to deploy a comprehensive education and communications campaign to help employees get ready for retirement."

The site provides:

• A Solution Center which helps the user leverage the appropriate education programs and communications to suit their specific needs
• A wealth of employee paper based and electronic materials and tools on retirement, investing, the elements of retirement plans and planning for retirement
• The ability to easily browse materials by life stage or by communications type
• The option to choose various methods of communication such as brochures, online education tools, seminars, and posters
• Instant access to the materials

"We've always offered great participant communications materials, but making them so easy for a plan sponsor, plan consultant or financial representative to use is just one of the ways we're invested in making plans work," said Art Creel, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing, John Hancock RPS. "Not only do we want to offer high quality plans, we want them to succeed on all levels – with good participation for the plan sponsor and retirement readiness for the employee."