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Life Health > Running Your Business

9 New Life and Health Insurance Job Market Insights

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In mid-2022, U.S. life and health insurers were struggling to keep employees.

Today, “the environment is quite a bit calmer,” Jeff Rieder, head of Aon’s Ward unit, said Wednesday, during a webinar held to present the results of a new quarterly U.S. insurance labor market survey. “We hope that continues.”

Although the insurance labor market is somewhat cooler, 89% of U.S. life and health insurers plan to increase or maintain staffing over the next 12 months, and 33% say they believe it’s even more difficult to hire now than it was a year ago, according to results of the survey.

What It Means

From the perspective of the staffing firms, the companies behind your clients’ life, health and annuity products look stable.

The Study

Ward, a Cincinnati-based business benchmarking firm, conducted the survey together with the Jacobson Group, a Chicago-based insurance industry executive search and staffing firm.

The companies do not disclose the participant count to the general public, but based on information Rieder and Greg Jacobson, the Jacobson Group’s CEO, gave during the webinar, the sample appears to have included about 75 insurers with a total of 193,000 employees. The life and health numbers may have come from nine companies with about 60,000 employees.

The industry survey began in 2009, as the insurance industry was in the midst of the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

The Results

Here are 12 takeaways about insurance industry staffing and employee compensation from the latest survey results.

1. Life and health insurer staffing was better than expected.

A year ago, 61% of the participating employers said they expected to increase staffing, 30% said they expected to keep staffing the same, and 9% said they expected to cut staffing.

In reality, 67% increased staffing, 33% held staffing the same and none decreased staffing.

2. The future looks good.

Today, 56% of the life and health insurers are predicting that they will increase staffing in the next 12 months, and 33% expect to hold staffing steady. About 11% anticipate a decrease.

If the insurers’ predictions come true, they will probably increase their total headcount by about 0.5%, according to the survey team.

3. Many life and health insurers think the job market still looks hot.

Life and health insurers rated the difficulty of hiring 6.6 on a 10-point scale, compared with an average level of 5.9 points for property and casualty.

4. Some fields are hotter than others.

Life and health insurers say they’re having an especially hard time hiring information technology workers, top executives and all kinds of data analysts, including actuaries.

They are having less trouble with hiring sales and operations staffers.

5. Tight labor markets might limit insurer staffing growth.

The insurance unemployment rate is only about 1.6%.

Jacobson said overall insurer employment may have decreased a little in the past year partly because insurers have had a hard time hiring.

6. The underlying structure of the insurance labor market might be changing.

Insurer staffing numbers might look flat because other organizations, such as distributors, are handling more tasks that the insurers themselves used to perform, Jacobson said.

7. Pay for employees who stay put is increasing more rapidly.

McLagan, an Aon unit, expects to publish final compensation survey data, which will include separate data for life insurers, in October.

The preliminary figures, which cover all sectors, show that typical salaries may be increasing by roughly 4% for most types of employees who stay in the same positions.

That’s up from a typical increase rate of about 3% a few years ago, Rieder said.

8. For some types of positions, the pay numbers could look different.

For entry-level sales reps who earn less than $50,000 per year, salaries may increase just 0.1%.

For client service and reporting employees, salaries for workers earning $150,000 to $200,000 could climb 8.7%.

9. Overall pay increases for employees in sales may be nothing special.

Overall, their same-position pay may rise about 3.7%.


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