Skilled staff shortfall looms as major challenge

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8 March 2010

A lack of training and under-staffing could give the insurance industry a big headache, according to a senior broker.

Speaking at an Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance breakfast seminar in Melbourne last week, Marsh GM Placement Services Southern Region Geoffrey Ferguson said there’s a “dearth of available talent” in the industry at present.

“If you look at the number of senior underwriting jobs around in the market at the moment, there are a lot of jobs available and a lot of companies are finding them pretty hard to fill,” he said.

This suggests there aren’t enough people adequately trained to take a step up into these roles, “and that’s probably because companies have locked them into positions where they’re [already] doing a good job”.

Mr Ferguson says it is getting increasingly hard to balance training against resources.

“It’s a very fine line and it’s getting harder and harder to have that balance,” he said. “But at the end of the day we need to realise that if we don’t train people, if we don’t bring them through, then the industry is going to face a real flux where we don’t have enough people.

“That is going to be more dire for the industry, in my opinion, than things like the withdrawal of capital supply.”