AI is shrinking the pool for junior hires. Is apprenticeship drying up, too?

Hiring for junior positions in the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry is drying up, as artificial intelligence fundamentally shifts away from the traditional apprenticeship recruitment model, panellists said last Thursday at the Insurance Institute of Canada’s annual CIP Symposium.

Danish Yusuf, CEO and founder of Zensurance, notes job opportunities for junior roles in brokerages appear to be shrinking.

“The roles that are changing most are…[those involving] knowledge work,” Yusuf says, when asked about the impact of AI in the workplace. “In our case, that means the onboarding roles for brand new brokers, brand new assistant underwriters — that’s the area where we’ve really dramatically reduced how much hiring we’re doing.

Yusuf noted junior engineer roles at a brokerage were the first to feel the impact two years ago. For example, a junior engineer might help a senior engineer improve the speed and accuracy of policy generation, quoting, and risk assessment (for example, collecting risk data to support a client’s insurance submission).

“On the engineering side, as of two years ago, we stopped hiring Junior folks,” Yusuff said. “We couldn’t justify giving them a good experience. The engineering side happened two years ago. The broker and underwriter side is happening now. So that’s the space that’s being impacted the most.”

Impact on Apprenticeship

Vlad Koltchine, chief revenue officer and insurance operations leader at Sinistar, moderated the panel discussion, ‘People First: Building Careers in the Age of AI.’ He wondered how the shrinking number of junior roles affects the industry’s traditional apprenticeship recruitment model.

“When you were speaking about some of the generally more difficult roles to fill with more skill and complexity,” Koltchine said, “to me, those roles tend to be the ones that had a more or less sort of logical progression in the industry, starting from the more junior through to the apprenticeship, and then the trust-building and then the experience building.

“And it’s question to the entire panel: Do you believe we’re at risk of disrupting this apprenticeship model that we’ve been so accustomed to in those more technical, complex roles?”

Yousef answered, “I think it’s going to change, and it’s going to change meaningfully, and it could be changing for the better.

“I’ll give you the analogy for us. We’ve got underwriters. We still want them to review files and do what they do. But in parallel, and they know this, the AI system is running and double-checking everything that they’re doing.

“And we ran through all of the past referrals that they’ve done, and the answers they gave, and what the system would have given. And it’s now helping the underwriters be much more efficient, because it’s running in parallel and making them better.”

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Impact on Gen Z

P&C industry careers most impacted by AI would be those of Gen Z recruits, said Randy Dhillon, senior vice president and chief people officer at Wawanesa. Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, is the age cohort following the Millennials.

“Gen Z would come into organizations to develop their skills, develop their critical thinking, develop their emotional intelligence, and some of the pieces that we use to breed the next generation of leaders,” Dhillon said. “And so, I think this puts significant pressure on your talent pipelines, and we have to intentionally redesign how you’re going to accomplish the same outcomes in a very different architecture moving forward.”

Gerald Legrove, president of DGA Careers, which specializes in recruiting for the insurance industry, says the shift away from recruiting for junior roles to more complex, specialized or technical roles means the recruiting process will lengthen.

“In D&O, complex construction risks, aviation — any role requiring greater expertise, greater complexity — you’re just dealing with a smaller pool of candidates,” he said.

“Beyond that, those companies that are employing those great people right now don’t want to let them go. And so, they’re going further, a little more, to hang on to people.

“For those of you who are not working with us or recruiting on your own, what I would highly recommend is, if you’re looking to fill a role that is critical to your organization, a role with a real knowledge or specialty work, take your time, get to know the individual well. Know what motivates them.”

But while the recruitment process may be getting longer, the AI world has the onboarding process shrinking.

A two-year-long training period to develop technical and soft skills has now been radically compressed, says Yusuf.

“What that means for us as the organization is we can’t rely on those two years to train people,” he says. “We need to hire them, have a really in-depth training program — and not over two years, but in two months. They have to be what would have been two years of training.

“It’s big investment from our side to get the people on board for sure.”

David Gambrill

David has twice served as Canadian Underwriter’s senior editor, both from 2005 to 2012, and again from 2017 to the present.