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Insurance companies have been trying to reinvent how they attract, acquire, and retain employees to stay relevant to the modern workforce. Replacing talent is a critical issue where the industry is seen as limited and limiting by geography, incentives, career paths, and more.
With rapid change, talent strategy requires the same focus as business strategy, but the talent strategy takes a back seat. New technologies gained adoption with the growth of digital, analytical tools, and AI/ML with implications on core functions.
The industry increasingly needs individuals with technical and soft skills in customer engagement and empathy to manage the risks and trends and optimize new tech’s value. Additionally, the industry needs a new approach to talent management and workforce planning.
There is a huge demand for tech and non-tech talent globally, with 184,000 job openings, most of them in North America. Some in-demand jobs include Data Engineer, Full Stack Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Application Security Analyst, Customer Success Manager, Compliance Manager, and more.
The demand for Claims Specialists has increased by 13% in 2022, with 50,000 jobs worldwide. The need for Data Analysts has also increased by 13% and for Underwriters by 11%, with 82,500 jobs and 45,00 jobs, respectively.
Matching the intensity of talent strategy with the business strategy
Despite digitalization, insurers face hurdles in sourcing talent. Primarily, they must:
- Document strategic ambitions, identify critical talent gaps, and reassess the organization’s readiness to meet near- and medium-term goals.
- Define goals by identifying changes to the company’s and practitioners’ working methods.
- Adopt necessary changes on a large scale sustainably.
When talent management connects talent to value and evaluate every candidate’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences, it creates consistent and optimal conditions for the organization and candidates.
Upskilling and reskilling as a talent management strategy
Most talent management teams struggle to fill new roles at the required rates, which is challenging, especially in insurance, particularly for digital, design, and analytics roles. They especially lose tech talent to tech companies.
Forward-looking and strategically minded talent management leaders will look to increase their organizations’ talent liquidity through internal development programs. An active learning & development (L&D) infrastructure becomes critical, and one must make digital learning effective and engage with virtual reality and personalized learning tools.
When learning programs support continuous development with a focus on the critical capabilities of the future, reimagined for hybrid and remote, talent management can match the demand for specific capabilities to the supply of talent when there is talent liquidity.
Draup analyzed various roles and mapped current roles with future roles and the skills individuals require to progress. Below is an example of roles that can be reskilled for the Claims Specialist job, who can later be reskilled to satisfy future needs.
According to Draup’s location intelligence, Paris is among the top locations to acquire talent for the Claims Specialist role. If you are acquiring talent for this role, you must know that some top employers include Allianz, Swiss Re, Marsh, AON, and AXA.
The top skills this role needs are Claims Handling, Claims Processing, Remoting, and Claim Management. Digital Tech Stack for the roles includes MS Excel and PowerPoint, Power BI, AWS/GCP, and SoCi.
Promoting diversity and offering a dynamic environment with workforce planning
Diversity in workforce planning is not yet a reality among insurers today. By infusing diversity in strategic workforce planning, talent management must address diversity issues urgently and embrace a culture of innovation.
However, insurers are not risk-taking as insurance is a balance-sheet business in which risk aversion is healthy; they must find the right balance between the conservative instinct with controlled innovation and risk-taking.
Talent management must change its working environments, redesign office spaces, add satellite hubs, and even create spin-off units that work under different norms from the parent company, developing ways of working and encouraging varied interactions.
Many traditional insurers have a deeply established process, and they may have a hard time implementing change. With the changes happening due to proactive steps, we hope others will also reimagine how they acquire, incentivize, and retain talent.
This report provides insights on the global insurance talent ecosystem, location intelligence on hiring quality talent, and reskilling initiatives to keep up with trends and mitigate disruption. It has provided a reskilling framework to step up talent from Accounting Analyst to Claims Specialist with skills to solve issues in the industry.
Draup for Talent is a talent intelligence platform that provides talent management teams with insights on available skills, amplifies their reskilling initiatives with viable insights, and answers the diversity question. It analyses 15M+ data attributes daily to assist talent management in planning, hiring and reskilling a future-ready workforce.
