How to Interest Millennials in Insurance Careers

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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:

• Millennials Aspire to Be Workplace Leaders; Seek Training: Survey
• How Millennials View the Job Market
• Insurers Face Challenge of Attracting Millennials
• Young Agents Rate Flexibility, Career Growth Over Technology: Vertafore Survey
• Insurance Agents Learn How to Market to People Unlike Themselves
• Hard-Hit Millennials Miss Out on Recovery Enjoyed by Older Americans
• Millennials Experience Most Burnout at Work: Job Seeker Survey
• Why Some Young Agents Chose Insurance as a Career