Destination Insurance: Exploring insurance’s perception problem vs other financial careers

Compared to other financial and professional services sectors such as banking or law, careers in insurance are often rated poorly by potential entrants. But what is the reason for this perception and what moves can the insurance industry take to improve its standing as a career path? 

This was the subject of a well-attended roundtable at Insurance Times’ Destination Insurance event last month, with attendees discussing their experiences of these challenges and sharing successes from their own firms. 

The roundtable was led by Neal Lumb, group sales and marketing director at Verlingue UK. Lumb explained: ”I’ve got to the point in my career where I’ve started to think about the next generation of talent who are going to replace me – and the more time I spend thinking about this, the bigger it seems that insurance as a profession is perceived [unfavourably] compared to other professions like law, private equity or banking.

”Those sorts of companies attract people with the promise of ’be part of the 1% and you’ll be driving a ferrari in 12 months’, but that’s not really true for most and those people could be really great recruits for the insurance sector.” 

Negative perception

The widespread insurance sector perception that a career in the industry is perceived negatively vis a vis other white collar careers is backed up by various pieces of research. 

While Ecclesiastical research from January 2025 found that 50% of UK brokers were struggling to bring in candidates under the age of 30, a October 2025 report from creative agency Free, which surveyed over 1,000 young people, showed that 67% of this cohort believed an insurance career would be “boring”, alongside concerns around personal growth, purpose and a fun, social environment. 

Roundtable attendees noted that challenges around the perception of the insurance industry versus sectors like banking might originate from the different ways in which young people interact with the products – and the fact that the insurance product is intangible. 

One attendee explained: ”Young people don’t particularly understand the [insurance] industry itself because they don’t interact with it. They understand retail and they understand banking because they have experience of them, but they don’t interact with insurance until they get to an age where, most often, they have to buy an expensive motor insurance policy.

”That can create negative connotations for the whole sector as well, in terms of it being a must-buy purchase, as opposed to something they want to buy.” 

Part of the solution to this specific challenge lays in engaging with young people earlier about the diversity of experience and security that an insurance career can provide, roundtable attendees explained. 

But, they added that adding an element of risk management or gamification to a policy between purchase and renewal could also increase engagement with the sector.

An attendee explained: ”My daughter has an app for her motor policy that tracks her driving and gives her a score – her and her friends are obsessed with it and it’s a great example of making the industry a bit more exciting.” 

Proud of insurance

Apart from increasing awareness of the insurance sector and the good it does, Lumb also asked the roundtable attendees about their views on how insurance could present a more positive vision of itself in currently untapped talent demographics. 

He said: ”We need to tell a better story in our communities, and in the market generally, about the value of connecting people to the cause of insurance and explain the value we provide.

“We, as an industry, need to start fishing in some different pools because there is talent out there and we should go and get it.” 

Attendees agreed that insurance could become an attractive career destination for a much wider range of people compared to other professional services sectors because of its low barrier to entry, whereas other sectors often required joiners to pass exam or have a university education. 

This has the extra benefit of promoting social mobility and other forms of inclusion, which the insurance industry is looking to support. 

An HR leader attendee to the roundtable explained: ”One of our unique selling points is that there’s a career in insurance with progression that doesn’t require academic style exams. We’ve got access to much broader, deeper and wider talent pools because of that if you think about people with different socioeconomic or diverse backgrounds.” 

Despite this advantage in potential, the Destination Insurance roundtable clarified that hiring from non-traditional areas, such as those with existing insurance experience, must be undertaken with a conscious recognition that these joiners would require increased levels of support, at least initially. 

Lumb explained: ”If we’re talking to hiring managers about investing time, effort and emotion in bringing people in from different recruitment pools, it’s fair to say that the culture around them needs to be correct. 

”Bringing people in from outside [of the insurance sector means] they’re not going to be productive from day one – and it’s a real challenge to convince the hiring manager that this is worthwhile. The business cannot expect immediate results here, because it’s a long term bet. But it’s a worthwhile one.”