From: Captive International

The demand for insurance talent is growing, which is especially true for the captive insurance industry. With baby- boomers retiring, generation X aging and millennials switching off at the mention of insurance – , where is the talent going to come from? Kathleen O’Neil Larkin, attorney and instructor at Missouri State University, says the gap between industry and academia must be bridged.

In an open letter to the insurance industry in 2015, the CEOs of Aon, Lloyd’s and Hamilton Insurance Group lamented the future of the industry. The letter spoke of 400,000 retirees from the insurance industry by 2020, a 25 percent decrease, and only 4 percent of millennials interested in the industry.

They referred to insurance as the career trifecta: stable, rewarding and limitless. Baby-boomers retiring, generation X aging, and millennials uninterested was the theme. What to do?

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that people working in, and leaving for retirement from, the industry, frequently said they “literally fell” into insurance. A phrase never heard was: “I always wanted to work in insurance growing up.” More often than not, it was “I needed a job”; “my father was in insurance”; or “the investment bank wouldn’t hire me”. But today’s insurance industry and, more specifically the captives segment, is not your father’s insurance industry, as they say.