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Envisioning A Future In Insurance, Risk Fields

What do undergrads today expect from employers in the risk and insurance fields? Here, we cover some common requirements, requests and perceptions.

By Harold Weston | Updated on May 31, 2012

Editor’s Note: This article was contributed by Harold A. Weston, CPCU, ARM, a clinical assistant professor of Risk Management and Insurance in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.

What do students looking for jobs in the risk and insurance fields expect of their future employers? 

Among the many factors that affect the success of the employment relationship are expectations and perceptions.

While compensation, work load, responsibility, and support of various types all are vital to the total relationship, the happiest employees are not necessarily the highest paid. Moreover, highly paid employees are not necessarily happy or loyal. Add in generational differences between management and employees (the newest generation is never as good as the last one) and work experience (for new hires about zero; for lateral hires a different culture), and the possibility for misaligned expectations and perceptions is a major factor that employers and employees have to surmount.

The risk and insurance fields are keenly aware of the need to recruit young staff due to the aging workforce, as many studies and articles have shown. The recruiting practice for a century has been to hire recent graduates of any college major. Most people in the industry admit they majored in anything but insurance and that they stumbled into the field late. In fact, the current president of RIMS told the audience at the annual conference that she was an art history major.

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