A poll of workers recently hired into the property/casualty insurance industry conducted during a Travelers Institute webinar last month produced some unusual results, surprising one webinar panelist who leads a key business segment at Travelers.
Only 20 percent of responding webinar attendees who were hired into the industry in the last five years said they factored company “mission and purpose” into their employment choices, and just about one-third said they valued “engaging and interesting work,” according to the in-webinar poll.
Competitive compensation and benefits topped the list (63 percent) that also had more respondents choosing work-life balance (59 percent) and positive company culture (50 percent). Culture edged out the final factor on the list, training opportunities and career development. (48 percent).
“I am probably not qualified to answer since I didn’t join the industry in the last five years,…but I would have checked all of the above,” said Michael Klein, president of Personal Insurance at Travelers, who has been with the company for 35 years. “I’m interested in … the relatively low response on alignment with company mission and purpose,” he said. “I think our industry has a very noble mission and purpose,” he said, expressing the hope that the webinar conversation to follow would shed some light on the lack of interest in this factor revealed by the quick-response survey. Klein, who started his career as an actuary, did not reveal how many attendees responded to the poll, nor did he indicate that the results were statistically significant.
In fact, Klein and co-panelists Denise Perlman, chief executive officer within Aon’s North America middle market segment, and Robert Hartwig, associate clinical professor of finance and director of the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center at the University of South Carolina, offered repeated examples of the purpose-driven and interesting career paths available in the P/C insurance industry at various points during the webinar.
Perlman offered the first reaction …