Home Features Talent Shortage or Workforce Reconfiguration?
Whether driven by retirements or re-configuration, the insurance industry is scrambling for tech talent.
This article appears in the July/August issue of Global Finance Magazine.
Caught between a wave of retirements and a weak talent pipeline short on tech-savvy candidates, the insurance industry faces a talent shortage that could affect its ability to address cyber and other emerging risks.
“Demand is rising sharply for fluency in analytics, AI, as well as in cyber risk. These are all capabilities that are either new or that the traditional sources of talent haven’t produced at scale,” says Peter Miller, president and CEO of The Institutes , a risk management and insurance education provider.
In 2014, to help expand the talent pool, a group of risk management and insurance companies, nonprofits, and educational institutions, led by The Institutes, created MyPath , a one-stop resource for job seekers that outlines the benefits of, and pathways to, insurance careers.
The initiative remains timely because, in a November 2024 Institutes report, 66% of insurance professionals in the property and casualty sector surveyed identified the loss of institutional knowledge as the retirement wave’s greatest impact: “The result is both a talent shortage and a knowledge-transfer risk.” That means organizations must find ways to “preserve institutional expertise that took decades to build” while developing new skills.
“There is a dual-sided talent crisis,” says Margaret Milkint, global insurance practice leader at DSG Global, an executive search firm. “Organizations are losing experienced professionals faster than they can be replaced while simultaneously racing to build leadership capacity around capabilities that barely existed a decade ago.”
The talent crunch is rippling beyond primary insurers to encompass reinsurance carriers, brokerages, and risk management firms, she says. “Artificial intelligence is creating an entirely new category of roles spanning enablement, governance, ethics , and cultural integration that require skill sets the traditional insurance pipeline was never built to produce.”
The shortage of talent with tech and AI capabilities has become one of the industry’s most critical gaps as roles across underwriting, claims, and risk management become more data-driven, says Victor Harris, vice president at financial services recruiter Selby Jennings. “The shortage is slowing the pace at which many organizations can fully adopt and scale their AI strategies,” he warns.
While they agree that AI is increasing demand for certain roles, experts at Aon observe that AI and automation are reducing demand in some entry-level and operations slots, particularly in finance and reporting.
“There is a risk of mischaracterizing the issue as a blanket shortage,” says Louisa Blain, head of insurance for human capital at Aon. “The reality is more nuanced, and linked to where the industry wants to grow versus the skills it currently has versus requirements for the future. This is less about replacement and more about reconfiguration of the workforce.”
Yet, the talent constraints could limit industry growth in specialist and emerging risk areas, argues Jeff Reider, head of Aon’s benchmarking, strategy and technology group. The Institutes’ Miller sees the shortage coming in cyber, complex liability, multinational program structuring, and cross-jurisdictional claims coverage.
“Knowled…