From: Captive International
With its eyes set on the future, CICA is busy nurturing the next generation of captive insurance leaders. Five of those involved in its initiatives give their views on the progress made so far.
To ensure it doesn’t become a victim of its own success, the captive insurance industry needs fresh talent. It is a rapidly growing sector—even more so since COVID-19—and it needs to ensure it has the people to meet the rising demand and fuel further growth. That’s why CICA is investing in several initiatives aimed at attracting talent—as through its College Student Essay Contest—and at helping new entrants into the industry progress and fulfil their full potential.
CICA president Dan Towle sums up the current situation, saying: “As the captive industry continues to grow, more job opportunities are created throughout our industry. At the same time, we are an aging workforce, and more professionals are preparing for retirement.
“Finding qualified talent is difficult, but not impossible. We all need to play a role in promoting the rewarding and exciting careers that are available in captive insurance.”
We all need to play a role in promoting the rewarding and exciting careers that are available in captive insurance.”
DAN TOWLE, CICA
CICA board member Michael Zuckerman, associate professor, risk, insurance and healthcare management at Temple University, has played an active role in helping to nurture new talent in the industry—not least by helping to create the CICA College Student Essay Contest. Working with students who are the potential industry leaders of the future, he is keenly aware of the need to create clear pathways into the sector. He echoes Towle’s concerns about the aging workforce.
“Nurturing talent is especially important because the Baby Boomers are retiring, and the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the mass resignations that everyone is talking about,” Zuckerman says.
“However, I like to think of it as a mass transformation. We have an opportunity to grab some talented people looking for a new experience with new challenges. Moreover, we must nurture the students from our undergraduate and master’s level academic programs and get them interested in captive insurance, or we’re going to miss out on a lot of skilled talent that will go elsewhere.
“The time is now to reach out and build the next generation of captive insurance professionals.”
Incoming CICA board member Prabal Lakhanpal, vice president at Spring Consulting Group, is focusing on this dual challenge and opportunity. He adds that the most urgent issue is that captives as a subject matter have a lot of nuance, detail and intricacy, most of which cannot be learned from just textbooks.
As with most other industries, practical experience is a vital component of the learning experience,” he says. “Be it tax, accounting, actuarial, legal, underwriting or any other facet of the captive industry—there are many underlying complex concepts and complexities that can only truly be appreciated and understood through experience.
The urgency of nurturing and developing the next generation of talent in the industry is this need for experience. The industry needs the next generation of talent to be in place so that they can learn from current thought leaders and experts. From my perspective, the transference of knowledge is not something that can happen in a short duration and we as an industry need to prepare for those transitions or risk losing substantial intellectual capital.”