A Global Conversation
Rules of Attraction

“The industry needs to encourage students and people that are entering the business world to think of insurance as a career. Insurance is not a career is the mindset of most students. If you look at the top 50 business schools in the country, few of those schools offer insurance as part of their curriculum.

We need more top schools to offer insurance classes, at least expose students to insurance so they can think about insurance as their career. When they're interviewing and looking for jobs, they have the exposure of insurance as part of the curriculum in a business school.

I graduated from Michigan State University. Michigan State did not have a program of insurance. There was not one class offered in the business school. It's a top-20 school, top number one or two in some areas. It's a high-ranked school with no insurance, not unlike most other top schools.

I convinced the school to allow me to endow a professorship in insurance, which we did. Now there's a professorship in insurance at Michigan State. More than one professor is teaching insurance.

The program has grown tremendously. It's up to almost a hundred students and is now offered as a minor. That's all in about four years. It's been successful.

If other people or companies could follow suit and come up with ideas for business schools to offer insurance, at least it would stimulate the student population to think of insurance as a career.”

“What we decided about five years ago was talent was going to be significant for us, going forward. The main focus of our approach to talent was to get out, bring people into our company, let them really see what an insurance company does, what the jobs are like. We've had great success from that. We've reached out to all the colleges in the area, high schools, anything we can do, intern programs, just to get people a chance to look under the hood, is what we call it.”

“A big issue we all have known about for a number of years is the talent shortage that's out there right now. There was going to be a 400,000 person gap in terms of open positions coming up in 2020, is what I first heard five, six years ago. Can insurtech help potentially fill some of those roles with replacing repetitive task functions with automation? Secondly, can insurtech make the industry more attractive to new entrants, both from a college student standpoint, and then, also, folks that are involved in other industries.”