In my 20-something years of writing about the insurance industry, I've been to plenty of conferences, and it always amazes me how little these events seem to have changed. Although overhead projectors have been replaced by laptop Power Point presentations, the dress is slightly more casual and there are usually more women and people of color, the general tenor is usually the same: high-level industry professionals talking about a problem on a macro level.

Last week's Griffith Foundation's Insurance Education and Career Summit examined how to attract more young people to a business where the average independent agent or broker is 55 or older. In some ways, it was like any other industry meeting, but with one big difference: participants included actual insurance students, the very subject of the discussion.

Recruiting Millennials is a huge issue to our industry and a personal mission of  American Agent & Broker. Recognizing the need for new blood in the industry and our readership, last July we launched the nexGens Initiative (nGI). Since then we've profiled and had guest blogs from dozens of young insurance professionals. But there was still something missing: the high school or college student who without intervention, would never even think of insurance as a viable career. The industry at large faces the same challenge.

Don't get me wrong; there are wonderful programs at carriers, brokerages and trade associations designed to reach and educate high school and college students on the industry. Representatives of most of those programs, including Project InVEST, CIAB's FAME and Gamma Iota Sigma's “Young Ambassadors,” were active participants in the Griffith summit. But I don't recall our industry ever trying to develop a collective message, or actually asking young people themselves what they wanted to hear from us.

At the Griffith summit, they gave us an earful. Almost all of the students said they had never considered insurance as a career until they'd taken a risk management class in college, and that the best way to get the message out about what a great industry insurance was is to have a unified message from the industry as a whole, not fragmented into personal vs. commercial lines, or carrier vs. producer.

Timothy Mazurczak is a freshman at Canisius College who started his postsecondary career as a finance major but became interested in insurance because there are more opportunities there than in investment banking. “I knew a little about insurance before, but I learned a lot more about the industry by being here,” he said. The best way for insurance to attract new talent is to convey the excitement and pay potential. “High school and college students think of insurance as the local agent they have to pay every 6 months. Investment banking has movies like 'Wall Street.' Insurance needs something like that.”

Cliff Gallen, a student at Temple University who is considering a brokerage career as a broker, agreed that insurance should be branded as a “fun and interesting career option,” and that the industry should provide students with the facts about the ability to advance through the ranks (a big issue for Millennials is the fear of getting stuck at one career level). He also stressed students' need for personal mentors. “We are at a very volatile time in our lives, and though it might not seem like much to an established professional, one well-timed and meaningful conversation could have an enormous impact on the rest of our career. This industry offers so many wonderful and fulfilling opportunities to pursue any and every additional interest a person might have, sometimes it just takes someone to point it out to us.”

And Ty Griffin, a student at Mississippi State who plans to attend law school but is attracted to brokerage or risk management, believes we need to stress the wide variety of career options available in insurance through testimonials by practicing professionals.

By the time the meeting was over, the group had settled on three initiatives: market research to determine what Millennials want in a career; development of a unified message on the many careers available in the insurance industry, and the creation of an information hub to consolidate insurance career information for easy access. The Griffith Foundation and The Institutes were voted to lead the effort and next steps included getting the word out to industry organizations that did not participate in the initial summit.

Will this collective effort succeed in forging a more unified industry message to attract younger generations? Only time will tell. But I believe including smart, enthusiastic young people in the planning mix can only help the cause.