Even before COVID, the world was undergoing a profound shift in human capital management, with business leaders working to address skills gaps, update their talent practices and instil more dynamic and agile ways of working. Since the pandemic, there is a worldwide shortage of talent, especially for people with digital skills. Whilst the insurance industry has quickly adjusted to remote working and online collaboration, insurers are being outfought in the battle to attract talent (e.g. Facebook/Meta and Google will hire 60% of UK data scientists in 2021-23 with median salaries of £80,000).
We are living in an era of the 3 Ds: De-carbonisation; Digital Transformation and Diversity. For the insurance industry there is the extra pressures of Open Insurance/Embedded Insurance, new disruptive InsurTechs. The result is insurers need to rapidly optimise their human capital management strategies.
But this message is not getting through to the C-suite within the insurance industry. In a 2022 EY survey of CEOs, only 5% of insurance CEOs said people and talent were a top priority for change in the next 3 years, compared to 26% of all CEOs across all industries.
Insurers need to attract new streams of talent, strengthen their corporate cultures, and enhance employee experience if they are to succeed when facing new challenges and changes in the mid 2020s.
The foot soldiers in insurance are no longer actuaries and underwriters but come with new job titles such as data scientists, digital business analysts, cloud specialists, experience designers, solution architects and scrum masters.
As a starting point, insurance firms need to communicate more on being a force for good transformation agenda. Insurance is entering a massively exciting period of change and innovation. Very few other industries can offer this.
At the high level, insurers need to break the mould that insurance is an industry that is slow-moving, dull, and only actuaries have career prospects. So, what next? Insurers need to spread the following messages:
