The insurance industry is heading for a crisis. Depending on which report you read the insurance industry is facing a shortfall in job vacancy from anything from 40,000 to nearly half million in the next few years. Baby boomers in specialized jobs like underwriters and claims adjusters are retiring and insurers are struggling to replace these employees.
Insurers face a classic good news / bad news scenario. On the positive side the industry is financially stable, has great career paths, good benefits and is almost recession proof. On the negative side the perception of insurance is an industry of laggards. The decision makers at the top are old-school, they struggle to relate with the millennial generation graduating from college. Insurance companies have got to be able to connect with these individuals and look cool because that is the “new normal”.
In an early Analytic Insurer blog I write how Data Scientist is considered the sexiest job of the 21st century. Ironically, the insurance industry is no stranger to the importance of analytics and has historically been success in attracting mathematicians and statisticians to the industry to work as actuaries. But as more and more industries and companies develop data-driven initiatives the demand for these individuals with analytical skills has increased. Therefore, attracting and retaining employees with such specialized capabilities remains a significant hurdle to overcome and a potential differentiator for those that do.
One insurance company that reversing this trend is XL Group. To get a better handle on pricing, XL Group created an analytical team led by SVP of Strategic Analytics, Kimberly Holmes to work on predictive, multi-variant analytics using internal and external data. After four years, XL has seen its claims per dollar of premium written fall significantly in those lines of businesses which were early adopters of predictive models. To read more about this case study and how analytical talent is driving a competitive advantage download the MITSloan report "The Talent Dividend".
The question for all insurers concerned with building their analytics capabilities is this: What is you plan for cultivating analytics talent?
I’m Stuart Rose, Global Insurance Marketing Director at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
