Biba’s early careers initiative boosts work experience placements by 33%

The second year of Biba’s early years career initiative has found success in working with firms to enhance the way the industry connects with school-leavers.

The association’s initiative has seen a 33% increase in pupils at the final work experience stage – up from 44 students in 2024 to 56 this year.

The year long career programme works with Bishop Challoner Catholic School and Mulberry Academy Shoreditch to directly promote the industry to school-leavers and provide work experience that enables an insight into the industry first-hand.

The initiative comprises four stages, with the first being a presentation to the 200-240 students in both schools in September and the subsequent offering of sector specific gifts.

The third stage is an activity day at Lloyds of London leading to the final stage, in which individual students are tailored to work experience placements at various firms industry-wide.

Nicola Maguire, programme lead and head of commercial at Biba, told Insurance Times that the initiative was launched in response to member demand for a programme that would “bring in new talent to the industry from underprivileged areas”.

She said that Biba members wanted to bring in a pipeline that they did not have access to or knowledge of and differed from typical graduate or apprenticeship schemes.

She said: “It’s top of the agenda for all of our larger firms and many of our members.

“The answer is bringing in more young talent from more diverse areas to equate us to the population so that, when selling products in the future, we’ve got the right people that we’re taking the lead from.”

With a “vision” for the initiative to run for “the next 10 years”, Maguire explained that the benefits for both firms and students show that a consistent approach is needed to make a difference.

She said that while there are pockets of early career initiatives, these are more often campaigns “rather than a continuous, effective roll through”.

Changing company approaches

After the first year of the programme, Biba released a tool kit to its members and regional committees across the UK to showcase the ways they can directly promote the industry to young talent.

These tool kits contain verbatim presentations to deliver to schools and universities and aim to “assist Biba members and partners in their journey to attract and obtain new young talent to the industry”.

She said: “A lot of our members want to go to their local schools. They want to go to their local universities, but they didn’t know what to say [or] how to approach it. Our member tool kit gives them that.

“We need to do more of it and make sure that we’re bringing in new talent because we know from numbers we’re not getting the right number of younger people into our industry as we should be to cater for the heavy end, where we know there’s a big drop-off [in middle-management and senior leadership] in a few years.”

The industry from the inside

Selecting schools using The Careers and Enterprise Company, Maguire stressed that the key criteria was picking local schools to cover a ESG element, as well as schools with high levels of diversity in terms of culture and social mobility.

Speaking to Insurance Times on the success of the campaign, Maguire said: “We have students now actively applying for insurance roles for this year [and] from the year that we started.

“When they would never have considered insurance before and where members would have never had access to these individuals.”

Commenting on the impact of the programme in 2024, Tim Gladstone, careers and enrichment lead at Bishop Challoner Catholic School, said: “The school’s partnership with Biba and its members provides young people with a unique and highly valued opportunity to see the insurance industry from the inside.

“Working in the insurance industry is not something that many young people consider whilst at school, nor is it something that they know a large amount about.

“As such when they return from work experience it is interesting to see how their understanding has changed, as well as some of them developing an interest in the field as a whole.”

Gladstone explained that the main aspect students talk about when returning from this work experience is the wide range of roles available within the industry which “they had never heard of”.