Considering the high-risk times in which we live – with fighting wars and devastating natural catastrophes – it comes as something of a surprise to hear global insurance and reinsurance CEOs put the dearth of qualified talent near the top of the list of things that keep them awake at night.
The problem has many parts, and each has a profound impact on the available pool of talent and the knowledge base of that talent.
Problem number one is the fact that senior (re)insurance industry figures born in the 1950s and 1960s are approaching retirement or have already left the workforce. The accumulated knowledge that they have or that they took with them is enormous.
Some of these people lived and worked through the first and second Gulf wars. While they would have been in far more junior positions to the ones they held before retirement, they will have seen precisely how the sector worked its way through such massive and industry-defining problems.
Many of them also worked through the 1987 stock market crash, the dot.com boom, the millennium bug hoax and the pandemic. Perhaps it is for this reason that so many of them are being retained today as advisers to governments, sovereign wealth funds, large investment banks and private equity companies.
Perhaps greater effort needs to be made to keep their expertise and skills within the insurance industry.
Problem number two is that the ability to keep up with technological advances in the (re)insurance industry is an illusion. Fundamental technology changes are happening with such rapidity that most people can only grasp the possibilities with an elusive grip. What’s true today may not be true tomorrow. Indeed, what was state of the art this morning may have begun to change by lunchtime.
The main technological issue facing the insurance sector today is the role of AI. Thankfully, the truth is that insurers need to know what AI can do – not how it does it.
But in terms of the talent debate, there is an acknowledgement that a proportion of jobs will simply disappear because of AI – although there does not seem to be much consensus over what proportion of roles might be at risk. There is also talk of getting AI to do the grunt work, leaving people free to do more value-added tasks, but this might turn out to be wishful thinking.
And the third problem is that the world’s population is both growing and ageing rapidly which introduces new and intriguing sociological problems all of its own.
Tomorrow’s insurance workforce will be bigger and older. Will we have jobs for them? If we do, what will those jobs be?
Every single business around the world needs insurance – as does every single family – so the growth prospects of the sector are vast. And yet we seem to take only baby steps in closing the protection gap.
Melding the huge industry experience of the sector’s veterans with the tech-savvy of the younger generations seems like a recipe for success. So why do we still have a talent crunch? M
Paul McNamara
Editorial director
Middle East Insurance Review