Better education can play a huge part in counteracting the insurance talent crisis, according to Zachary Finn, professor and director of Davey Risk Management and Insurance Programme at Butler University.
Speaking on the ‘Using Captives and Experiential Learning to Recruit and Train Millennials’ panel at the annual Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) Conference in Arizona, Finn explained that educating millennials why people in the industry do what they do and how it affects society could be vital.
He said: “I think it is more courses to describe what we do, but also more messaging about why we do what we do and how it helps society.”
The Butler University professor warned the industry of the potential severity of the impending talent crisis.
He said: “We are facing an existential talent crisis. The supply side is a major problem, compounded by the stereotypes of working in insurance.”
“Those of you that feel you have a good young workforce, get ready because they’re about to get poached. It is coming.”
Finn’s statistics showed that there would be an estimated 400,000 job openings in the industry by 2020, while the estimated number of risk management and insurance graduates between 2017 and 2020 was estimated at just 15,072–a clear discrepancy between supply and demand.
He explained: “It’s really close to 2020. These figures sounded ok in 2012 but we’re getting there really fast, and the problem is really a big one.”
“There is going to be some rough years, there are carriers and brokers that have a world of pain coming.”
The issue, according to Finn, is that young people are not properly informed of what a role in the insurance industry entails.
He said: “It’s not that millennials have a problem with working in the insurance or captive or reinsurance industry, they just don’t know what that means.”
“There isn’t knowledge of the problems we solve and the people we help. We aren’t giving millennials enough info to make that informed career decision.”
Finn’s programme at Butler, the Davey RMI programme, educates students through experiences, each student has to complete two internships for academic credit and are involved with operating the nation’s first student run captive insurance company.
The Butler professor explained that this experiential learning was especially important in the insurance industry and that he wanted his programme to be a framework for other programmes to follow.
He said: “For insurance and risk management in particular to actually experience some of these things first hand is really, really important. More so than any other area of business.”
“We are trying to solve the talent crisis, Butler is just the platform for us to try our our ideas and bring them out to others, but once they’re working we want to share.”