How outreach, mentoring and apprenticeships are changing insurance

In the latest Insurance Post Podcast, which explores how school outreach schemes, apprenticeships and mentoring can attract as well as retain fresh talent to the sector, Clemence said: “We are now in competition for actuaries with Deliveroo, or any other company using science and data more effectively.

[Insurance] is a fantastic industry to be in. It is diversified and there are varying skills you need, plus the career paths you can take are varied

“Those are companies that are well heard of, that children will have been using from a younger age, [more] than they will have thought about insurance.”

Clemence said it was all too common a tale that people “fall into” insurance, which was partly why QBE partnered with Action Tutoring so that colleagues could spend an hour a week with pupils on pupil premium or free school meals to help them with English and maths and give them a glimpse of those working in the sector today.

He said: “It [insurance] is a fantastic industry to be in. It is diversified and there are varying skills you need, plus the career paths you can take are varied. 

“There are huge opportunities and yet people find it [insurance] largely by accident. 

“We’ve got to reach out to people in parts of the country who wouldn’t have thought of going into insurance or whose family doesn’t have any link to the industry.”

Gemma Lloyd, head of talent partnerships at the Clear Group, said outreach and mentoring was a “two-way street” that opened eyes to the potential rewards of a career in the industry and helped the sector realise what the next generation wants from insurance products and services.

Yasemin Dogu, chief auditor and mentor at RSA, and Kishan Mangat, co-chair of iCan, said mentoring and apprenticeships provided established players in the industry with an excellent opportunity to pass on their knowledge and ensure the next generation do not have to face the same barriers they did.

Mangat also shared information about how Post readers can become a mentor or a mentee via iCan’s mentoring scheme, which allows those early in their career to reach out to senior executives in the market and establish a relationship to push ahead with their career.

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