This time last year I may have written about how, while 2020 had been a pretty miserable year, 2021 promised to be so much better. As it turned out, that optimism was somewhat misplaced. And, since I am writing this on the day that a new COVID variant has necessitated a return to some restrictions on our freedoms, I am not going to go down that path again. But that does not mean I am not looking forward optimistically to the wider future – and much of that optimism springs from some things we have done in recent months to address the issues of diversity and inclusion in our market.
We are all conscious that this is a real challenge for our sector. We have not tended to recruit from sufficiently wide pools of talent to ensure that our workforce is reflective of society as a whole. This is something that it is going to take time to fix. But we will only begin to make that progress if we get on with doing stuff now.
That was very much the spirit behind the work we started at LIIBA at the beginning of this year. We gathered together a group of people whose only qualifications for being involved were enthusiasm for the subject and a desire to get things done. If there was a third element that tied us together, I suspect it was a shared frustration at having sat in on a number of talking shops which have not led to much action. So, we resolved to just crack on with a few things and I am delighted that this approach has been fruitful.
During October, we ran a session for around 50 school-age students of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). We partnered with the charity STEM Insights who specialise in sourcing students for these sorts of events from under-represented backgrounds. It was based on a similar session Willis Towers Watson had run in 2020 led by the incomparable Heather Connery-Leggett.
What Heather recognised was that by opening the concept up to the wider broking community we could both achieve an even better outcome for the students and at the same time help solve one of the key issues we as LIIBA have seen around D&I issues. 50% of our membership are firms that employ 10 or fewer staff. They do not have the resources to engage in dedicated initiatives designed to expand the diversity of their workforce. But by LIIBA running this sort of exercise – drawing on expertise from across the broking sector – we can give those small firms the chance to participate in something that would never be available to their firm alone.
The session spread across all five mornings of the students’ half-term. We created a scenario involving a cyberattack and brought in experts from across the industry to discuss how their roles would react in these circumstances. This included scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians but also actual brokers, board members and compliance professionals so that the students got a full insight into how insurance works – and, hopefully, how it is a much more exciting and glamorous career than they may have previously thought. And the feedback suggested this. Eighty-nine per cent (89%) of the students on last year’s course said they felt they had a much better understanding of insurance; 90% said they were now actively thinking about a career in insurance as a result of attending. The response this year has been similar. So that is a new core group of people enthused about our industry – an alumni group that we are already organising follow-up events for. And a number of their schools have asked us if we will present at their careers day. And those students might just tell their friends about their experience, and they might want to come on the next course.
This is a small step, but it is an important one and it is just the start. As I have intimated, we are already planning another session next year. And we are talking to the London Market Group about industrialising the process and running several next year involving some of our insurer friends (although we need to be careful not to put the students off!). Plus, we are in discussion with the charity upReach about a scheme that would allow LIIBA to sponsor 40 high-achieving students from under-represented backgrounds through university – but then offering the chance to our smaller members to take on the sponsorship of one or two of these students. Again, a way of giving the heartland of our membership access to initiatives they could never fund on their own. We are also developing a ‘How to get into insurance’ course with Prince’s Trust that will target 18- to 30-year-olds no longer in education.
A truly diverse insurance market is going to take some time to develop. But we have started to do the work we need to make it happen; and we are finding ways that allow the full range of our community to get involved. I am really looking forward to the day when we can welcome one of our STEM students into a full-time role in the market. Who knows, one of them might even fancy a job with a trade association.
