Attracting talent to the insurance industry

THIS column was inspired by a friend and colleague who has just completed 50 years in the insurance industry. Since he is only in his early 70s, the job in the first insurance company he joined must have been the first one! And he has since stayed in the same industry and is still there! Now, he heads one of the top five life insurance companies in the Philippines, the BDO Life Assurance Co. Inc. In the dinner he hosted for family and friends to commemorate the event, he narrated his experience as if it happened only 50 days ago, not 50 years ago. Another friend wrote about Mr. Renato Vergel de Dios and the celebration in an earlier column in this paper. We just cannot get over the fact that there are still loyal and committed professionals in the insurance industry. The Ayala Group of companies, which included the Insular Life before they became a mutual company, the FGU Insurance Corp., the Ayala Life Insurance Co. and the Universal Reinsurance Corp., had a retirement program that granted generous retirement payouts to those who completed the required years of service or reached the age of 60. I can still remember the sadness and the difficulty of accepting that they would no longer be part of the companies where they spent the best years of their lives.

The situation is very different now. I believe that it is not only in the insurance industry where we are experiencing fast turnovers of people especially the millennials and now the Gen Zers. An oldtimer like me still cannot understand why employees would leave an industry that offers so many opportunities to young professionals, especially new graduates. Since our schools do not have courses specifically about insurance, training is done in the industry either by the companies that hired them or by the Insurance Institute for Asia and the Pacific (IIAP). Training is not only about the technical aspects of insurance; management and other soft skills are also part of the program. There are also many opportunities to train abroad as foreign companies offer training programs to employees of their clients and business partners. Training and/or attending conferences and meetings in various parts of the world is another opportunity to learn more about the business and interact with other practitioners. I have been fortunate to have been sent to these conferences and the experience derived from these meetings cannot be expressed in words alone. Last week, I saw on Facebook a post of a group of ladies who qualified for the prestigious Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) award for life insurance agents all over the world. They were in the airport on their way to Vancouver, Canada, where the annual conference was to be held.