How Canada’s insurers can win the race for talent and skills

Three ways to engage the workforce in navigating disruption

Canadian insurers are in an era of continuous change and disruption. Social issues, technological disruption, demographic shifts, regulatory pressures and climate change are just some of the forces that are impacting the stability insurers have long relied on and creating a growing imperative to reinvent their businesses.

While insurers have been taking steps towards reinvention for some time, achieving the right outcomes requires them to adopt and combine a broader range of transformation initiatives, one of which is to build a workforce equipped with the skills of the future and ready to adapt to change. So how can they do this, especially when it remains challenging to find talent with critical skills?

The changing landscape for Canadian insurers

Before outlining specific solutions, it’s important to explore the trends creating talent and workforce pressures in the insurance industry. Below are just some of the key drivers of change for Canadian insurers:

According to our recent Hopes and Fears Survey of workers around the world, 44% of insurance industry employees said they were at least moderately likely to change employers within the next 12 months, highlighting the need for insurers to take a step back to reassess their workforce strategies. This could include looking at how important functions like distribution, product development, actuarial services, underwriting and claims handling are changing and redefining roles, teams, structures and performance metrics accordingly.

A restless workforce also suggests insurers need to do more to attract, retain and develop people with the skills and capabilities they require. A key opportunity is to rethink career paths to create opportunities for employees to acquire and apply new skills.

Consider how employees in important functions, such as those in finance and other knowledge-based roles, are increasingly being called on to bring forward-looking insights to the business units they serve. Insurers can support those employees by assigning them to roles in the business units temporarily so they can further develop their acumen. Canada’s insurers can also build on their existing advantages when it comes to offering more engaging experiences and career paths to workers with the right skills and mindsets: as large organizations with global operations, they can give people new opportunities, such as secondments abroad, that equip them to better support the business and its strategy.

As insurers look to transform into cloud- and platform-enabled organizations, both leaders and their employees know they need a different mix of capabilities, including digital skills, to successfully execute change. In fact, a large majority (84%) of insurance industry employees who participated in our Hopes and Fears Survey said digital skills would be important to their careers in the coming years. But what if some of those skills were already available in a company’s workforce and just waiting to be tapped into? 

This is where a skills-based approach can help. It involves taking a step back to assess the skills a company already has and those it needs to build, borrow or acquire. Doing so can help insurers better understand gaps their existing employees can fill, which we see as an important opportunity given that more than half (59%) of insurance industry participants in our Hopes and Fears Survey told us they have skills that aren’t clear from their qualifications, job history or current role. 

It’s also important to consider the role of leaders, including middle managers, in helping employees work through and contribute to change and reinvention, especially given the anxieties many workers feel about technologies like generative AI. Developing transformative leaders who can build trust with employees as insurers adopt generative AI will be key. One way to do this is to support leaders in encouraging their people to experiment with generative AI tools and making it safe for them to fail when they do.

Leaders can also build trust with their people by learning more about generative AI themselves, addressing employees’ concerns about it and engaging in open dialogue on how they can use it in their roles. Workers have many questions about it, and leaders can help them understand what it means for them.

Leaders also play an important role in creating more effective hybrid working environments. As managers look to train, mentor and develop their people in a hybrid world, it’s important to be intentional about their interactions with employees. This could mean paying attention to employees they’ve spent less time with and observing them in their roles to identify new growth opportunities.