Tapping Into the Talent Pipeline

By 2020, the entire insurance industry will have 400,000 positions to fill. About 120 academic programs exist worldwide offering courses, concentrations and majors in risk management and insurance. About 80 are located in the US. All of these programs need to grow to meet the future need for new talent. What can agencies and brokers do to support these programs and partner with them to recruit for their businesses?

Insurance and risk management curriculums are niche programs that are not generally well known in academia. Most niche programs rely upon industry contributed funds to pay faculty salaries, student scholarships and costs to attend conferences, industry meetings and other events, so funding is critical to their growth and sustainability. Faculty in this field must engage students in events with industry professionals in order to promote their programs, recruit students, and meet industry professionals from whom they can raise funding for their programs, develop internships and learn about career opportunities.

Numerous insurance and risk management associations on national, state and local levels support and assist programs with this work. Agencies, brokerages, carriers and individuals provide annual funding and multi-year pledges to support program operations.

Industry individuals and groups can also form industry-owned foundations to support local programs.

In the 1980s the Texas Insurance Education Foundation raised funds from various independent insurance agent associations. It then collaborated with the Wortham Foundation to develop an insurance program and create a $1 million chair at the University of Texas.

When the Texas legislature subsequently passed a statute requiring UT to admit the top 10 percent of students graduating from every high school in the state, affecting the insurance program’s ability to recruit students, the program was practically extinguished. As a result, UT has never met the industry’s goal to become a major producer of new talent for the industry. The TIEF recently was revived by a group of independent agents and insurance company affiliates who now intend to control its funding in order to sustain the foundation in perpetuity, while distributing contributions in support of programs that are most successful in producing industry practitioners.

The Insurance Council of Texas Education Foundation is an industry-controlled foundation that provides scholarships and program funding for students to attend its annual symposium. Its board targets programs that demonstrate the ability to train students for careers in insurance, specifically for carriers. It also distributes an electronic resume book of scholarship recipients to its 500 member companies.

Recently, the University of Houston-Downtown, the University of Houston and Texas Southern University collaborated on a proposal to the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters Society of Houston to create an annual budgeted amount to cover the cost for students to attend their meetings. The CPCU board created the Myron Steves Scholarship fund. Instead of providing three annual individual student scholarships, Houston CPCU Society now provides 65 insurance students from three universities access to its most valuable asset — its members — and gave CPCU members direct access to the developing talent pool.

While many of the above examples of industry/student interaction are Texas-specific, the ideas behind them are universal in scope. The more agent and broker associations, their members and other industry professionals support and are involved with university programs, the more contact they have with students and are able to tap into the developing talent pipeline.