To make insurance appealing to college grads, smash the myths
One of the most serious problems facing the insurance industry today is the acute shortage of bright, college-educated young people entering the profession. Walk around any college campus and you’ll find that the brightest and best of our graduates are not thinking insurance. Talk to them about careers and you’ll hear “computers,” “finance,” “banking,” “law,” “marketing,” “medicine” — all the so-called “glamour” professions. Rarely will you hear “insurance” or “risk management.”
But insurance is one of the biggest and most diverse industries. It involves — and indeed, couldn’t operate without — people trained in finance and banking, in medicine, marketing, engineering, advertising, computer science and law, as well as people with underwriting, actuarial and management skills. Insurance, in fact, encompasses more of the “glamour” professions than any other industry in America.
Why then, aren’t we glamorous enough to attract young people? The answer, in my opinion, is poor public relations. The insurance industry suffers from a negative image. Our work is rarely thought of as creative or intellectually demanding. “Dull” is more like it. Yet those of us who are involved in the industry, who have made it our life’s work, know that nothing could be further from the truth.
Too many of our college graduates think of insurance strictly in terms of sales. Their knowledge of the industry is based on very limited personal experience, or worse yet, hearsay. They’ve never even heard of commercial insurance. The only kind of insurance they may know much about is auto insurance.
Few bad apples
While there are many dedicated and knowledgeable people in the field, the sad truth is that the majority of good professionals are often overshadowed by the few bad apples. Recent scandals regarding bid-rigging at some of the nation’s biggest brokers have once again damaged our reputation. There’s still the old image of the insurance salesman as a grasping, aggressive, and possibly even unscrupulous person — eager to sell, but reluctant to help with a claim. This stereotype is based on ignorance. But ignorance is something we have the power to correct.
We need to change our image. And we can change it by launching a massive public relations and advertising program to educate the public and make people, particularly college and high-school students, aware of what our industry is really all about. The industry should help educators nationally develop a curriculum that would teach high-school students about the insurance industry’s positive key role in our society.
We need to tell young people that personal insurance is just one segment of our industry, and that sales is only one of the many attractive careers available in it. We need let students and their advisers know about business insurance and risk management, and about the many opportunities in it for men and women with talent, ambition and skills. We need to make our future MBAs, our law, marketing and engineering students aware that insurance is the very cornerstone of our economy that makes all other commerce possible.
In my efforts to recruit young staff for my company, I have traveled to many campuses. I have found it easier to sell insurance to many of the Fortune 500 corporations than to sell a single outstanding student on a career in insurance.
Dramatize our story
To change that, we need to dramatize our story. If we are going to recruit on campus, we must emphasize the creative challenges facing our industry today. And we must do it in a sophisticated contemporary way, taking advantage of the Web, blogs and podcasts, along with seminars and fun events highlighting the industry’s past achievements and current challenges. We need to show that insurance and risk management offer exciting, vibrant careers.
Feature stories must be developed for the media pointing out the roles the insurance industry plays in strengthening corporations and in building and preserving communities.
Our message to the academic community must focus on the positive — including the role of risk management and how we work to improve safety to save lives and protect homes and businesses. Let’s talk about the kind of research and creative thinking that allows for the development of new insurance products to protect against new risks like terrorism.
Let’s act, rather than react! We are living in an age in which technology seems too often to have gotten out of control, as we spend endless hours checking e-mail on our Blackberries and laptops. While technology is crucial in insurance and risk management, it takes skilled humans to use that technology successfully and apply the human touch.
Everyone in the insurance and risk-management field knows very well that it is dynamic, not dull. We know that our work is challenging, rewarding, personally and professionally fulfilling — and addictive. It’s time we stopped keeping all that a secret.
If our profession is to thrive in the 21st century, we must embark now on a campaign to attract the best talent available. Our future, and the future of the industry as a whole, depends on it.
Ernesta G. Procope is president and CEO of E.G. Bowman Co. Inc., an insurance brokerage and loss control firm located on Wall Street in Manhattan that ranks as America’s largest minority-owned and woman-owned insurance brokerage. She founded E. G. Bowman as a storefront agency in Brooklyn in 1953. She can be reached at procope@egbowman.com or 212-425-8150.