I recently participated in two thought provoking events on the same day: one was an in-person Insider Progress event hosted by EY with breakfast and networking thrown in, while the other was an online webinar run by the Insurance Supper Club (ISC) Working Parents Forum. Quite different forums but similar in the way that they are both focusing on how to support people across insurance: to come into the industry, to come back into it, to thrive while working in it, and more.
At Insider Progress you might say I was a passive participant – I was learning from others imparting their wisdom on a couple of panels, being challenged by other people’s questions and soaking it all in. For the ISC webinar I was much more active – I had somehow volunteered myself as a speaker. I am not sure what everyone else got out of it, but I certainly gained a lot. The care and thought that went into the planning and the consideration of what experience and advice would be useful to the audience, followed by the sense of community during the webinar, the buzzy online chat going on with people sharing their dilemmas, and others offering ideas, tips, legal rights and so on was hugely stimulating.
It was deeply encouraging at both events to see that sense of community that thrives in insurance. It’s easy to mock it as old school, old fashioned and even cliquey. One could say that yes, the network functions well, but what if you’re outside the network? All valid points but ones that the insurance market is, I would argue, broadly aware of and working to address. You could see that in the ISC forum participants – nearly 100 women across borders in a variety of roles collaborating and supporting one another.
What wisdom can I add? It’s easy to identify the issue, less simple to provide workable solutions. What we were agreeing on during both sessions is that change can’t come only from the ground up – it requires leadership. Leaders need to be open to bringing in new talent from different backgrounds. Exec committees need to be prepared to spend money and time on returnees’ programmes so that they don’t fall at the first hurdle. Companies need to develop recruitment methods that don’t accidentally filter out some of the brightest talent because they cannot tick some basic boxes at the first stage. Perhaps even PR firms could carefully examine our own internal prejudices about who will “fit in” or give the right impression to clients! We need to play the long game and build for the next 10 years, not just the next 12 months.
From analysing my own career so far as I prepared my talk, I learned that whether you have a plan or not, events do not necessarily stick to your plan! We all change throughout our working and personal lives, and it is almost impossible to predict at age 16 how we will progress all the way through to retirement. More importantly – and this seems to ring especially true for workers with families, although it’s not exclusive to them (us!) – we need to accept this as part of life. If we cling to an idea of how our careers “should” be, or how career development “should” look, or what a traditional underwriter “should” know, we miss a variety of fabulous opportunities that are right under our noses.
Haggie Partners runs a series of video interviews with our team and one of the questions we ask is, “what advice would you give to your younger self?” It’s striking how often we reply with a version of “stop questioning myself” or “just get out there and try things”. How people view work has changed dramatically over the past few generations, as the mindset has shifted from when my parents began work and many assumed that they would join a company and stay there for
life. But it seems we have further to go in being really open to flexibility in careers – both for ourselves and others. It might not be easy, but the most worthwhile challenges often aren’t.