Room at the top – Recruiting the next generation of insurance leaders

How to attract, retain and nurture a diverse range of talent is one of the biggest issues challenging the top minds in the UK’s insurance industry.

Insurance sector leaders increasingly see gender, ethnic, social and age diversity as the key to building the agile and flexible organisations capable of staying competitive in an era of rapid and disruptive technological transformation.

As Aviva’s global talent and organisational development director Bernadette Bruton says, “We are committed to getting diversity in at the very beginning.”

One problem right there, according to some, is the sector’s reputation as a glamour bypass.

Marcelle Foxcroft, head of resourcing at AXA UK, is working hard to demonstrate to potential recruits that this is not so.

“There is a misconception about what working at an insurer such as AXA is like. It is fast-paced and exciting and – in the direct space of our business – our competition is as much Amazon and Ebay as it is rival insurers.

“To find talent we can’t just post a job ad and wait for replies – we have to go out there and search for the best people and sell AXA as a company,” she adds.

Helping hand

Thankfully, government is lending a helping hand.

Indeed, the apprenticeship levy scheme is widely regarded by the industry as a way of addressing the dearth of school and university leavers joining the industry – and as a way of persuading them to stay.

Biba chief executive Steve White highlights partnering with government and e-learning as key to attracting staff and making sure they get the precise training they need.

“Biba has signed a partnership agreement with the Department for Work and Pensions, which includes creating simple documents for careers advisors to explain the benefits of a career in insurance broking.

“In partnership with the CII, we have BrokerAssess, the market-leading e-learning tool. This has around 35,000 broker staff members licensed to use it. This partnership also incorporates the Broker Academy face-to-face training programme which runs across the country providing training based upon what brokers say they want,” White adds.

Biba and AXA are agreed on the need to tackle the ‘insurance-as-a-fun-place to-work’ deficit and have deployed mainstream media to try and give the sector a make-over.

“For example, the Daily Telegraph is running an article on careers in insurance (the article is called ‘Who Says Insurance Can’t Be Cool’), which we have been involved in arranging,” White says.

Sue Barnes, head of property and casualty at Willis Towers Watson in Ipswich, gives a good report of the impact of the new apprentice scheme at the coal-face.

“We recently recruited our first batch of apprentices in September… Our original target was 23, however, our intake has increased to 39 due to increased business demand – that in itself shows the value placed on this”.

Leveraging the academic networks of existing WTW’s staff is also key, Barnes says.

“We have close relationships with our local universities, with the relevant alumni within WTW assisting to attract talent into our Ipswich location. Their activities include attending careers fairs, holding insight days and arranging internships etc. all of which feed our recruitment pipeline”.

Diversity is key

Increasing diversity among insurance recruits is also seen as key to enhancing the reputation of the sector among the customers who they hope will buy their products.

ABI, for instance, holds frequent workshops with The Brokerage Citylink, an independent charity providing young people in London with a ‘Pathway’ of opportunities into employment.

It also recently hosted a young professionals’ event with the Insurance Charitable Foundation and the industry’s Next Generation Insurance Network, which took stock of how the sector is doing in terms of attracting and retaining talent.

Aviva is cited by the ABI as one firm in particular which is very active and focused on the diversity agenda.

The company is a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter and a member of the Thirty Percent Club.

“We have also done an awful lot internally,” says Bruton.

Between 2016 and 2017 alone, Bruton says Aviva increased its female intake from 29% to 56%.

Aviva also provides bespoke training via its “Accelerated Leadership From The Inside Out” programme to ease the advance of promising female talent through the corporate ranks.

Aon has a number of programmes in place to reach different communities and encourage them to see insurance as an interesting and viable career option, says senior consultant and UK apprenticeship lead Adrian Johnson.

‘Step Up’ – a traineeship programme set to start in Q1 2018 - targets the NEETs – Not in Education, Employment or Training – of East London and its ‘Go Further’ apprenticeships aim to attract new talent, upskill the existing workforce and so focus on leadership development.

Aon also partners with SEO London (ethnic, gender and social), the Bright Network, Spiral (social mobility) Lennard Cheshire (Disability) to cover a wide range of diversity segments.

Aon says it is driving an inclusive culture to foster talent because it believes valued colleagues lead to happier, more engaged employees which results in higher productivity.

Aviva’s Bruton argues that diversity is the best guarantee a company can have that it will have the diversity of thought to remain responsive and competitive in an already unfolding future characterised by transformation and disruption.

Aviva is also actively seeking to increase the over 50’s among its workforce and is committed to having 25% of its staff in this age bracket by 2022 in line with the ageing of the wider UK population.

Aon’s Johnson goes along with that.

“A diverse workforce from different social backgrounds and with broader experiences also leads to diversity of thinking, enabling us to think like our clients and allowing us to deliver innovative solutions to them,” he says.

Ageing of the workforce, skills shortages and the impact of transformational technologies are also focusing the minds of those involved in insurance recruitment.

And, while the problem starts at the bottom of the recruitment pipeline, its ramifications can stretch right to the top.

The ABI has paid particular attention to the future leadership issue with the launch of its ‘Future Leaders’ Programme, a year-long course aimed at equipping promising senior leaders with the skills and experience they need to lead insurance and long-term savings companies.

Influencers outside the industry

“The course introduces senior leaders to key influencers outside of the industry, such as legislators and regulators, and exposes them to existing CEOs. Reflecting the ABI’s support for diversity and inclusion, there is a strong commitment to gender diversity among the Future Leaders delegates and since launching in 2015, over 80 people from across the industry have benefited from the programme,” says ABI Director General Huw Evans.

These leaders themselves will have to answer the question of what skills and what talents will be required from their workforces in the future.

IDEX chief executive and resident horizon scanner Matt Green says that Insurtech will transform the industry and the jobs it offers.

“More insurance companies are starting to partner up with tech corporations in a bid to reduce their premiums, by offering technology that will decrease the chance of an incident by 20%, they can charge 20% less than their competitors,” Green says.

“Jobs such as auditing insurance risks for technology and loss assessors, whose job is to assess a building before an event history, rather than afterwards, will become more common as the market shifts to focus on prevention rather than reimbursement.

Similarly, cyber-crime has already created a new and growing sector of the insurance market, which requires people skilled at using and developing computer hardware and software.

But sometimes disruptive technologies are also providing a solution to the problem of how and where to find the talent of the future. 

Foxcroft says AXA came up with a novel solution when it faced a problem finding the right data scientist.

“A great example was our search for a data scientist where we used machine-learning platform Kaggle to host a competition to find the best person to work with us, the prize was a job at AXA”.

Tech has also been key to providing broader solutions to AXA’s employment quandaries across the UK.

“We also use a platform called TalentNeuron which has proven to be a real differentiator. The tool gives us insight into skills, wages and talent in different regions across the UK, which helps understand the best places to recruit and what salary we need to offer to attract the best talent”.

Brokers Willis Towers is leveraging its own internal networks in a thought-leadership approach to solving the potential tech skills gap of the future.

“The Willis Towers’ Young Professionals Network launched last year and is growing fast, with over 650 colleagues in 15 different UK offices,” the company said.

“The network’s aim is to Inform, Involve, Influence and Inspire,” Willis Towers says.

The network recently hosted a panel discussion on “the fourth industrial revolution”, which explored changing workforces and the use of Artificial Intelligence.