How to Interest Millennials in Insurance Careers

May 1, 2015

Many property/casualty insurance professionals are worried about how the industry is going to replace the huge population of baby boomers retiring now and over the next decade.

Almost half of insurance industry professionals are over age 45, with 25 percent of the industry expected to retire by 2018. What’s more, there will be 400,000 open positions by 2020.

Fortunately there are people with ideas, experience and tools that can help those looking to attract young talent and otherwise compete in the talent wars. Here are four.

Building a Culture

Culture is one of three key areas that distinguish insurers that simply maintain status quo operations from innovators, according to Chromium’s Peter van Aartrijk, who lists leadership and branding as two other factors. Here he explains why companies that innovate will have the most success attracting Millennials.

Understanding Millennials

Sixty percent of his company’s employee force is Gen Yers, says Ben Walter, president and CEO of Hiscox USA. So his company has plenty of reasons to understand them. Here Walter talks about hiring experienced employees versus employees right out of college. Also, he shares research and recommendations on what seems to motivate Millennials, how they differ from baby boomers, and how to coach them to success.

Broader Perspective

Sharon Emek runs Work At Home Vintage Employees, a company that looks for ways to outsource retired baby boomers from the insurance industry back to insurance firms, brokers and carriers across the country. She is also attuned to industry struggles to hire more younger employees. Millennials are looking for more excitement, she says. They do not want to be put into silos. So the industry must adopt a broader, more risk management perspective and find ways to expose young people to the societal good that the industry does.

Educating Millennials

“Millennials, who will be the future of this industry, really don’t know much about insurance, and that is really the problem we are trying to solve, so they will consider insurance as a career option,” says The Institutes’ President and CEO Peter Miller.

The Institutes’ solution is MyPath, an online platform designed to help students and other young adults explore their career options within insurance and risk management. The MyPath web portal (www.insuremypath.org) is intended to be a solution to get the word out about insurance and risk management and the options that folks can pursue to find the jobs that they want in the broader field, Miller said.

Related:

Topics Talent Training Development

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Latest Comments

  • February 26, 2017 at 8:56 pm
    Trent Hunt says:
    Keep running and operating your agency the way you did for the last twenty years and I guarantee your will not attract the millennial talent pool. There are some talented ind... read more
  • June 15, 2015 at 10:11 am
    Agent says:
    Ron, at one time, you were a young guy in this business. You were not suited for sales then and aren't now. Millenials are more suited to a desk job, not sales production. ... read more
  • June 12, 2015 at 3:39 pm
    Bob Fancher says:
    Agent and ex underwriter whatever. Millennial generation has seen different treatment of their parents and other colleagues. We cannot generalize what they will do, but unde... read more

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