CII Executive Director calls for industry collaboration to boost talent attraction

On talent attraction and driving the sector forwards, Gill said: “I think it is all about education, and one of the real issues we have is that insurance isn't yet a degree that people can access. So until it's something that young people are exposed to on a much more regular basis, and not just the personal lines insurance that their parents will have, then we can't expect them to understand it or know about it.

I think it's very interesting that we've been trying to launch T Levels and we're really struggling because colleges are not interested in taking up the insurance or the financial service T Level because they haven't got anybody who understands it available. And we've been offering to train tutors up in colleges, but it's not something that's on their radar. So it is absolutely all about getting into schools, helping kids understand what insurance is for. I mean, it's the best contract in the world, isn't it? Where you pay in, in the knowledge that someone else will benefit from your generosity, and hopefully not you, and someone else is going to be looked after because of the money that you've put in. And helping people understand that that's the contract - it's not, ‘I've paid this amount in and therefore I should be able to get this amount back’, that's not what insurance is about - educating people properly so that they understand the altruistic reason for it.”

On tangible action for improvement, Gill said: “Within the insurance industry, lots of different organisations are doing lots of different [talent attraction] initiatives. If we just got together and did a few things really well, then we'd be far more impactful. So that would be the call out: it's OK to collaborate. Because we all cater to different people, so there's space for everyone. There's enough of us. It's a huge industry - 40,000 of us just in the city. If we bring the forces together, the change can be much greater. I'm a big advocate of collaborating and working together.”

When asked whether AI will change the industry, particularly from a career perspective, Gill said: “Yes, undoubtedly it will change it. But absolutely, I promise you for the better. Because what AI is going to be able to do for us is basically take away all of those [activities] that are mundane, and take loads of time to do. AI will augment the human in that respect. So, what it will do is allow far more time to be in front of the clients or inside the organisation doing the things that humans do really well. And when I talk about the future world of work with AI, particularly in insurance and personal finance, I explain a model that that comes from two guys that used to work for Accenture. They split this model into what humans will always continue to do, which is around that difficult decision making, the emotional attachments and so on. And then the stuff that machines do brilliantly, which is obviously data crunching and so on and so forth. And then what they talk about is where we meet in the middle. And the example I use there is how a surgeon using a robotic arm can slice a cornea to a thousandth of a millimetre - that's the two of them together. I genuinely believe if we open our eyes to [AI], if we decide to embrace it, it's going to just enhance our roles. The AI will augment our roles rather than destroy them.

The full podcast episode is available here.