Insurance Professionals: Stop Sitting on Your Hands and Start Mentoring Young Talent

In today’s world, the mentality is “more for less.”

This is especially true with our expectations of our new industry level professionals. We place more demands on our young professionals with less training.


Looking at all the statistics that are published relative to the industry, there is going to be a significant talent loss in the next 5 to 10 years.

For the most part, we are not giving these professionals the same formal corporate training many of us seasoned professionals were fortunate enough to benefit from. With that being said, we must ask ourselves what are we doing as industry professionals to give back and help develop the eager youth to become proficient and effective contributors to this amazing industry.

I’ve been in the insurance industry almost 30 years. Starting out as a claims adjuster for Liberty Mutual in 1991, I got hired as a multi-line claims adjuster in their Des Moines, Iowa office straight out of college.

At that time, I had never been exposed to the risk management and insurance industry.

At that time, Liberty did not care what your degree was in as long as you had one.

Prior to reporting to the Des Moines office, Liberty sent me to six weeks of intense adjuster training — three weeks of book work and three weeks of field training. During that training, I learned things that I still remember and utilize to this day. I actually still have and reference my two training binders I received.

Thinking back, I was pretty blessed to have received such a formal training entering the industry. This training helped establish a strong foundation for my career and is one of the reasons I have chosen to mentor other young professionals.