The inaugural Risk Management and Insurance Strategic Collaborators Summit, happening this week in Iowa City, is designed around how the insurance industry can recruit, inspire and equip the next generation of risk management professionals. 

The event is organized by a national group of higher education institutions that want to advance innovation and address the most pressing challenges facing the risk management and insurance industry.

Jim Lewis, summit organizer and executive director of the Emmett J. Vaughan Institute of Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Iowa, said the goal of the event is to ensure future insurance professionals are prepared for an era shaped by artificial intelligence, innovation and rapid workforce change.

Insurance talent is “getting older and then we’re retiring,” Lewis said, calling it one of the biggest risks for the insurance industry.

“They didn’t really have the steady flow of talent coming back in, and so that’s partly what I’m trying to do here at Iowa is grow our talent pool for the industry and make sure they’re future-ready,” Lewis said. “We’re not just going to take jobs that are empty, but they’re going to be part of that voice that’s doing this innovation, for example, how do we address talent shortages, how do we use AI to help upskill and retrain a lot of our workforce that’s not in the industry?”

Lewis told the Business Record earlier this year that the insurance industry is “facing a significant demographic shift.”

He pointed to Insurance Thought Leadership, a global network of insurance and risk management thought leaders, which published statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It projects that the insurance industry could lose roughly 400,000 workers through attrition by 2026 in the U.S. “Most of those departures will come through retirement,” Insurance Thought Leadership wrote.

The summit is designed to “tackle the talent shortage head on,” Lewis said. Several elements of the event speak directly to this issue, including the RISC Innovation Challenge, where student teams from leading universities nationwide will compete on seeking innovations to an emerging risk. The University of Iowa team chose to focus on the “rising risk of the industry’s talent shortage,” Lewis said. 

They will propose how AI can help predict and prevent risks while “empowering policyholders to become better risk managers,” he said.

Lewis also said speakers will address the issue.

Dan Keough, chairman and CEO of Holmes Murphy, will discuss how innovation and company culture can help attract and retain talent in a sector where half the workforce is set to retire by the early 2030s, Lewis said.

Susan Hatten, chief marketing officer at Holmes Murphy and chief operating officer of BrokerTech Ventures, is among those attending the conference and will be a judge in the innovation challenge.

She said that “we have a lot of individuals that have been in our industry for many years that will be moving on into retirement and aging out. There’s a gap in terms of filling those … positions.”

Still, there are bright spots, she said.

“From a young pipeline standpoint of talent, we see tremendous opportunity, and it’s through programs like the RISC [Summit] and the Insure Your Future program with the state, which the Economic Development Authority has pulled together, that have created that talent pipeline which didn’t exist five years ago.”

To view a full summit agenda, visit the event page.