Closing the Gap
How the Institutes are helping insurers prepare to fill their ranks in the wake of the retiring baby boomer generation.
Employers nationwide, insurers included, are losing some of their most experienced and valuable employees as baby boomers retire at a rate of 10,000 a day for the next 20 years—roughly 73% of the people in the work force today. Peter Miller, president and chief executive officer of the American Institute for CPCU and the Insurance Institute of America, explains how the not-for-profit organizations are offering educational programs to help close that knowledge gap.
BEST’S REVIEW: How is the baby boomer demographic impacting property/casualty insurers?
MILLER: If you do that math, [baby boomers retiring in the next 20 years represents] about 73 million people out of a work force of a little over 100 million. That impacts all of society and most particularly the P/C industry. The effect is that a large portion of an organization’s institutional knowledge and know-how is going to leave the door in the next few years. That’s certainly something that should be of concern to everybody in the industry and in particular to leaders of the industry.
BR: Have insurers started to focus on that?
MILLER: Insurers are now realizing that succession planning is not just for the top level of the organization. It’s not just something that you work on in the last part of a person’s career, but it’s something that needs to permeate all levels of the organization and needs to really be incorporated into a person’s career path right from day one.
BR: What can companies do to start preparing for that?
MILLER: The first thing to do is to really take a step back and understand your business goals and say, “What are we trying to accomplish and how are we going to go about accomplishing that?” That leads you to ask, “What skill sets do we need in our people in order to be able to do that?” It’s a systematic analysis of what skill sets are required and how do we meet those skill sets and have all of that aligned with our business objectives.
BR: And how can the Institutes help companies close that gap?
MILLER: That’s really what we view as our mission: To bring education and professionalism to the industry by filling what we call the knowledge gap. While we continue our focus on designations, we also understand there’s a variety of different ways that someone might want to consume education in order to fill that knowledge gap. We’ve taken our textbooks and are converting them into online products that we call COMET programs. They are bite-sized chunks of education that meet an immediate need that can be delivered online and that present a multimedia format that people entering the work force are more accustomed to seeing. We still have textbooks, still have course guides, still have exams, but the Institutes have established online products that are really built around competencies. A competency is a skill, knowledge or attitude that someone needs in order to do their job more effectively. And by understanding the competencies that fill the knowledge gaps and then providing educational experiences in a variety of different delivery mechanisms, I think the Institutes are well positioned to meet the educational needs of the changing demographic profile of the industry.
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