How to Bring in Young People to Insurance

The workforce is faced with a generation gap. Baby boomers are retiring at the rate of 10,000 per day. Generation X and millennials each have a smaller pool of people than baby boomers. Generation Z is now the largest percentage of the U.S. population. This generation gap needs to be addressed.

The insurance industry, especially independent insurance agencies, are void of young people. There is a huge lack in the 23-45-year-old range. Unfortunately, new workers don’t consider insurance as a career. Most are not at all interested in our industry unless they have had a family member in the business. Some people even look down on our industry, almost like used car salespersons. So, how can this problem be tackled?

The time to get people interested in insurance as a career is when they are formulating their future, especially with young college students. There are a number of colleges with the Risk Management & Insurance degree, including the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where Catherine (this author) attended. The following list of colleges have great Risk Management and Insurance programs and are often in many top 10 ranking in the U.S. by various sources.

• University of Pennsylvania – Philadelphia
• University of Georgia – Athens
• St. Joseph’s – Philadelphia
• University of Wisconsin – Madison
• Temple University – Philadelphia
• Georgia State – Atlanta
• Florida State – Tallahassee
• New York University
• University of Illinois – Champaign
• University of Texas – Austin

Other colleges to consider include:

• Cal State Fullerton
• Eastern Kentucky – Richmond
• Butler University – Indiana
• Indiana State
• Olivet College – Michigan
• Ball State – Indiana
• Univ of Minnesota – Twin Cities
• St. John’s University – New York

All of the colleges above can be approached by insurance agencies and insurance companies for candidates to hire for their firms. This major boasts a nearly 100% employment rate. Taking heart in that statistic, there are many careers as follows:

• Insurance agencies (sales and service positions)
• Risk analysts and managers
• Underwriters
• Claims professionals
• Loss prevention consultants

The use of temporary help through college internships is a great way to get young people interested in an insurance industry related career. A young intern could see what the different positions are in an agency or insurance company, and what role they might enjoy doing. As we know, there are many different facets to the insurance industry, and it can be very challenging, but also exciting.

Some of our clients offer internships to college or even high school students, to give the student an opportunity to check out what it might be like to work for an insurance agency, as well as the agency gets to evaluate them as a future full-time employee.

One such independent agency is the Fournier Group in Portland, Ore. Owners Dirk Fournier and Greg Kuhns hire on average two students per summer to do various jobs within the agency, with some guidance from other employees. Catherine’s children, Rachel and William both had internships at this agency. It gave them a good understanding of what goes on day-to-day, to see if insurance might be of interest to them.

Rachel spent time in all aspects of marketing for Fournier from writing newsletters, to designing marketing materials, to creating collateral for trade shows, and helping to merge an acquisition’s identity into the Fournier brand.

William spent his internship in sales and got to see how The Wedge approach worked, and other tools the agency used to beat the competition — from proposal preparation, to applications, and sales prospecting and calls.

They both also handled the phones, navigating calls to the right employees from four different offices. Both are still determining their careers, and I (Catherine) am hoping they will join Oak & Associates as consultants full-time in the next few years, after they have received some world experience elsewhere.

Some insurance companies also offer internships, such as Employers of Wausau, Hartford, Transamerica, Geico, Auto Owners and Farmers & State Farm Insurance–to name a few. Some of the work can be underwriting, claims, or marketing type work.

When I (Catherine) was in college, I had an internship with Employers of Wausau in its Wisconsin home office (Employers Insurance Company of Wausau is now doing business as Liberty Mutual Insurance Company), and they only picked three student interns nationwide. The next year, my sister (Connie) got the same internship. Each summer, the interns would go from department to department in the home office, learning and getting a feel for all the roles one could play working for an insurance company.

When I graduated, Employers of Wausau offered the interns positions if we wanted them. I didn’t go to work for them, but the internship experience gave my sister and I a great background in the roles one could play in insurance.

I did take a job with St. Paul Fire & Marine as a marketing trainee, with an initial role in commercial underwriting to be able to understand the carrier’s philosophy and products for my marketing position. My sister went into risk management with several different firms. No one in our family was in insurance, yet we both ended up in the industry because of this initial internship experience that introduced us to the industry, as well as the great information we learned in our Risk Management and Insurance degree from Wisconsin.

The National Insurance Women’s organization has worked to get people into the industry careers by going into high schools on career days to talk about the jobs available in the insurance industry. The purpose was to talk to them about opportunities, in case they felt intrigued to go and check it out, as a high school graduate or to even go to one of the many colleges that offer Risk Management and Insurance degrees.

Check out www.investprogram.org for more information on education, internships, scholarships, etc. Project InVest is insurance education for future leaders within the industry.

Insurance is a great career! More people need to find out about it.

Offering college and high school student internships is a very good way to give young people a taste of what the industry has to offer.

Many of our agency clients struggle with getting young people into their firms. The colleges and even community colleges are ripe with students wanting challenging and rewarding work.

For links on how to start an internship program, how to hire interns, 2020 internships available, email us at catoak@gmail.com and we will provide you with a list of these websites.