This piece is by Laura Drabik, Chief Evangelist, at Guidewire
Movie classic The Apartment includes archetypal scenes of insurance office drudgery. Twenty-something Jack Lemmon works for a nameless Manhattan insurance company, sitting at a desk cranking a mechanical calculator. To underline how much he is a drone, Lemmon sits surrounded by rank upon rank of similar workers doing the same job at similar desks.
This and other popular culture images of how dull insurance office work life still resonates. Indeed, for an industry anxious about a skills shortage, getting young people to want a career in insurance has meant having to overcome a dull reputation that’s outshone by other sectors.
Could this be changing as students get their exam results this month and minds turn to plotting future career directions?
The answer is yes because that stale image is being consigned to history as the industry digitally transforms and how much the fundamentals of what makes insurance so vital can make the profession so attractive to the many talented younger people looking for purpose in their lives.
But let’s remind ourselves of the challenges.
Research by insurer RSA reveals that more than a quarter of the UK insurance workforce is older than 50 and thus on the verge of retiring. However, it seems the industry is struggling to replace these older workers who are fast reaching retirement age. For example, the London Market Group that represents insurers employing more than 35,000 people in London has said that the proportion of their workforce over 50 years old has shot up by more than 50% between 2014 to 2020, while those under 30 has fallen by more than 12 percent in the same timeframe.
This struggle to attract and retain younger talent suggests a crisis in youth appeal for a career in insurance. In their 2024 Talent Shortage Crisis report, the Chartered Institute for Insurance warned that only 4% of young people consider a career in the insurance sector to be appealing. This is compared to 31% wanting to work in healthcare, 36% in education or technology and 40% in arts and entertainment.
While the challenges are substantial, there are signs of a changing perspective on how attractive the industry is as a workplace.
We recently repeated our annual survey of European customer attitudes to insurers and its findings suggest some positive movements. The number of customers who think that insurance is an exciting and innovative place to work has increased from 37% in 2024 to 43% in 2025. Notably, the growth in this view has been most prominent amongst those aged 25-34, where it has risen from 44% to more than 1 in 2 (57%) of customers in this younger age group.
What’s more, the number of customers who think the industry is a diverse workplace where you get to work with lots of different people has risen from 57% to 61%. Again, there are parallel increases in this positive viewpoint for those aged 25-34, rising from 59% in 2024 to 69% in 2025.
So, what could be driving this change?
The industry is taking heed of the advice of the CII and others to proactively promote the attractiveness of the sector. There also has been a great deal of work done to open new pathways into insurance through apprenticeship schemes run by all the major UK insurers, who make a powerful case for how the sector offers well paying, fulfilling work. These, in addition to the well-established routes for graduates, are doing a good job in addressing the challenge and changing wider perceptions.
The extent to which anxieties around worsening geopolitics and climate change could be reshaping customers’ relationships with their insurers might also provide a lever for improving the image of the sector for younger workers. There is a steady trend of customers thinking better of their insurer. Our study reveals that the number of customers who say that insurers understand them and that they value insurers’ products has risen from 24% in 2024 to 32% in 2025, which is 12% higher than it was in 2022. At the same time, the number of customers who hold negative views has dipped. For example, those who do not think the insurance industry does enough to help people in need has fallen by 10% from 29% in 2024 to 19% in 2025.
As generational experts claim millennials and Gen Z-ers value purpose more than older generations, then how insurers protect what is valuable to our lives and livelihoods in ever more uncertain times can be used to make the sector more appealing to these groups.
In fact, my own pathway into insurance came through how much I realised the insurance industry is about supporting communities in times of urgent need. As a psychology graduate who took a loss adjuster job because that was the first job I could get out of university, my first assignment was to help customers whose homes and livelihoods had been damaged, even wiped out, by tornadoes and extreme weather. This experience forged my career in insurance. Doing a job with such a clear purpose to make good, to repair and replace has a strong appeal to talented and committed people who would otherwise choose a career elsewhere.
The other factor that is boosting the industry’s connection with young talent is how it is being reshaped and reengineered by technology.
Of course, some may argue that the greater use of AI and automation fills that skills gap and make efforts to recruit younger workers less important. However, the increasing use of better digital tools to get work done more efficiently is another important strategy in attracting younger people who can bring other strengths to the job like empathy and communication.
As digital natives, younger workers expect their future workplace to be digitized to align with their innate skills and how they like to work. The ability of AI tools to support their entry into the workforce and streamline processes and remove soul destroying jobs (remember Jack Lemmon cranking the adding machine to assess a claim) helps to make the sector more appealing to new workers.
Furthermore, when insurers explain how innovations in personalised or parametric insurance make them more responsive to customers in need of help and how this is linked to the need to harness data collection and analytics, there is an even stronger pitch to a technologically smart graduate.
How the insurance industry is being transformed and reimagined by technology is making it more of an energised magnet for younger, digitally savvy people who want to be part of that transformation. This is the culmination of the insurtech revolution that has not toppled traditional insurers but ushered in a rich mosaic of exciting collaborations and partnerships among insurers and insurtechs to change how insurance is done using modern technologies as diverse as machine vision, drones, cloud computing, analytical AI, generative AI and agentic AI. The mainstream use of these technologies opens up new pathways into insurance for people who are enthusiastic about change and new ways of doing things.
When you combine this confluence of exciting technological transformation with how insurers are seeking to serve our communities and protect and preserve what matters for people in sometimes challenging times, you have an industry that can ably compete for new talent against other sectors like banking.
As we see many more people making insurance claims – for example, more than one in three customers made a claim over the past 12 months in our survey, which is the highest ever – there is greater connectivity with insurers. That seems to be improving people’s perception of them – not just as sources of invaluable help, but also somewhere they or their children should work in the future.
There’s always going to be huge competition to attract young talent in the industry. However, it seems that insurers are and can do more to make their offer much more appealing especially as they digitally transform to serve customers more effectively. Getting more diverse and younger talent into the sector is happening at a crucial time when insurers are embracing modern technologies and processes to make themselves even more relevant and vital, which is what can win over the best and brightest to join the workforce.
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