Editorial: Facing the Great Resignation

This year’s Captive Insurance Companies Association (CICA) conference saw many of the great and good of the captive insurance industry decamp to Palm Springs in southern California to meet up again.

Next year’s meeting will be in Scottsdale, Arizona—but how many of the aforementioned great and good of the industry will be there for it?

There is a growing issue for the captive insurance industry—and the greater insurance industry beyond it—to face: the need to keep staffing levels up as executives retire or resign from their position. In other words, is recruitment keeping pace with vacancies?

It’s an increasingly important question to ask in 2023. It’s been almost exactly three years since the first national and state lockdowns that drove the reality of COVID-19 home. For millions of people working from home became a fact of life.

And it changed a lot of attitudes. There was nothing like a major planet-wide pandemic to make people take stock of their lives and ask if they were happy doing what they were doing on a daily basis. People took stock—and many decided on a change of career.

Insurance has been just as affected as other industries by the consequent “Great Resignation”, as people resigned from positions that they might have been expected to stay in for years.

Some in the industry have previously flagged this issue as important for its future. Anne Marie Towle, chief executive of Hylant Global Captive Solutions, mentioned it before the CICA conference to Captive International as a major concern for captives, and she’s right to be worried. How many of those who assembled for CICA this year will be out of the sector next year?

The wider industry needs to be aware of this as well. As Towle and others explained at the event, spreading the word on captive insurance around the world’s campuses is an increasingly vital part of recruiting talent to the world of insurance.

Getting the cream of the crop of the upcoming next wave of graduates has always been important for insurers, but for captive insurers it’s even more important. How many students out there know what captive insurance is? How many future key executives might be missed by insurers not reaching out to colleges and universities, offering to explain the benefits of working in insurance?

The captives market has come a long way over the past 50 years but it cannot succumb to complacency when it comes to the captive executives of the future. Education, recruitment drives, training initiatives, regulatory updates—any combination of these could be key to the continuing success of the market as it looks ahead.

Perhaps the answer to the Great Resignation should be the Great Recruitment?