Two careers. Two continents. Field notes from the threshold (Part 2)

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

By Joshua Schneeloch

Click Here to Read Part 1

400,000 Open Seats

I went to Atlantic City looking for the future of our business. The number that followed me home was 400,000. In late June, I walked the floor of the NABIP Annual Convention in Atlantic City. The theme this year was Racing Ahead, printed in bold across the banners, over a room full of energy, sharp minds, and decades of hard-won experience. I loved being there. I also could not shake one question as I moved through the crowd. If we are racing ahead, who is going to be driving in 10 years?

I looked around that room for the next generation. I found some, and I was grateful for every one of them. What I mostly found was my own generation and the one ahead of it. The people who built this industry were everywhere. The people who will inherit it were harder to spot. That gap in the room is the same gap the whole field is facing.

Last month in this column, I laid out the shape of that shortage, the six-to-one imbalance between the producers heading for the exit and the young people arriving to take their place, and the 400,000 seats the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to open over the next 15 years. That is the headline. This month I want to go underneath it, because the empty seat count hides two truths that make the picture harder than a simple shortage.

The first is that the few young people who do join us tend to leave. LIMRA has found that only about 15% of new financial professionals are still with their hiring company after four years. Many agencies lose half or more of their new recruits inside the first 12 months. We are recruiting into a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and then we wonder why the water level keeps dropping. Filling 400,000 seats means very little if most of the people we seat get up and walk out. Recruitment without retention is an expensive revolving door, and right now the door is spinning.

The second is that the inflow has been flat for years. The ranks of independent agents barely moved across the last decade of available data, rising only from about 190,000 to 197,000, while the retirement clock kept ticking. And the churn we do have is expensive. By common estimates, it costs six to nine months of a producer’s pay to recruit, onboard, and train a replacement, and the real figure runs higher for a licensed producer who needs product knowledge and years to build trust. An agency with heavy turnover is quietly rebuilding its sales force every few years and paying full price each time. This shows up on the balance sheet as surely as it shows up on the org chart.

And it is personal for everyone reading this. If you own a book of business, the pipeline is your problem too, because the value of what you have built rests on there being someone qualified to service it, buy it, or carry it forward when you step back. A thin pipeline quietly discounts every agency in the state.

So why do they leave? Most of the time it comes down to one missing ingredient, which is guidance. Too many firms hand a new producer a phone, a list, and a quota and call that onboarding. Young people will pour years into a career that shows them a path and puts an experienced person beside them, and when a newcomer finds neither, the door becomes the easiest thing in the room to find.

The fixes are not a mystery. LIMRA’s own research points to a short list of what keeps new people in, including a fast start, a strong selection process, joint field work, real skills training, and mentoring. Every item on that list is one human being investing in another. This is a relationship problem with a relationship solution, and it sits well within our power to build.

That thin turnout of young faces in Atlantic City is the same story in miniature. If the future of this field is supposed to be in that room, we have to ask why so little of it showed up. A convention is a mirror. Ours is telling us something, and we can either listen or keep printing bigger banners.

Last month, I said I was stepping into the Professional Development and Award board seat at CAHIP-LA to build a mentorship initiative. Let me go a step further and say what I think it should be. Pair every willing veteran with one new entrant for a defined stretch. Put them in the field together on real cases. Give the newcomer a fast start, a reason to stay through the lean months, and a name to call when the work gets hard. Then, measure who is still standing after one year and two years and publish what we learn so any chapter can replicate it. California is the right place to prove it—one of the largest benefits markets in the country, sitting on one of the youngest and most diverse talent pools anywhere, much of it already in our community colleges waiting for an invitation.

Carriers and general agencies can help fund it, community colleges can feed it, and the chapters can run it. The pieces already exist. Our job is to connect them.

I am writing this as an open invitation. If you have built something that brings young people in and keeps them, I want to learn from it. If you know a college student, a career changer, or a young professional who belongs in this business, I want to help you bring them through the door. Reach out to me on LinkedIn or through CAHIP-LA at info@cahip-la.org, and bring your ideas. The best answers to this will come from the people living it.

The seats are open. Four hundred thousand of them, and counting. The real question is what we do while they sit empty. We can watch the retirements roll in, or we can start building the on-ramp that carries the next generation into these careers. I know which work I want to be doing. Meet me at the next convention, and bring someone young with you.

“We are recruiting into a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and then we wonder why the water level keeps dropping.”

If you want a hand in shaping what we build on the other side of the door, reach out to CAHIP-LA at info@cahip-la.org, or join the movement at nabip.org/professional-development.

For a direct conversation about alignment, services, and book protection strategies with Joshua Schneeloch, visit www.joshuaschneeloch.com/ or linkedin.com/in/joshuaschneeloch.