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 Although overhead projectors have been replaced by laptop Power Point presentations, the dress is slightly more casual and there are usually more women and people of color, the general tenor is usually the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.