It’s once again that season—graduation time. With schools recently concluded, numerous graduates are now searching for employment opportunities within the nation or overseas. Eager to finance their aspirations such as luxury vehicles, condominiums, travels, and more, these fresh grads seek financial independence. The insurance sector extends an enthusiastic welcome to all you recent graduates! Currently, there are 31 life insurance firms alongside 52 non-life insurance entities seeking dynamic and youthful recruits to bolster their workforce. This field thrives and expands continually. It presents innovative products and novel operational methods perfectly tailored for younger professionals.
Worry not over lacking knowledge concerning insurance; comprehensive training awaits. You’ll receive guidance towards roles most suitable for your skills or gain experience hands-on from day one. Various aspects of this domain can be explored through courses offered by the Insurance Institute for Asia and the Pacific (IIAP), marking half a century since inception last year.
The institute has courses in marketing, technical underwriting, management and other soft skills. IIAP has also forged a collaboration with the other institutes in the Asean region to conduct online courses on various subjects and later be entitled to an Asian Diploma after completing the requirements. One will benefit from the interaction with the participants from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, to name a few. IIAP has partnered with the Chartered Insurance Institute of London to allow a graduate of our Basic Non-life Insurance Course to take the Advance Course after complying with some requirements.
I’ve discussed the employee training within an established organization previously. Moving forward in this segment, allow me to delve into the initiative by the IIAP aimed at attracting fresh college graduates to enter the field of insurance. Although I might have covered this topic before, I feel it’s important to revisit it. The specific program I’m highlighting here is known as the Select Universities Insurance Training Scholarship Program, or SUITS for short.
Who are eligible to join the program? Graduating students from any college or university who are interested to explore and pursue a career in the life or non-life insurance industry. IIAP conducts an active search by inviting graduating students and entertaining referrals from these universities. It is a 10-week scholarship program designed to provide a strong foundation in the insurance business through broad core courses in insurance, basic management, values integration and presentation skills. No tuition fees are charged to the participants. Meals and daily allowances are provided for during the training period. The program hopes to develop strong knowledge of general insurance and life insurance concepts and principles.
In addition, participants will learn strong interpersonal and communication skills, and acquire confidence in dealing with colleagues and clients. Soft skills like improving grammar in business writing, leadership, personality development and values integration are included in the program. This year, artificial intelligence (AI) and other topics in technology will be included in the curriculum. When the training program is done, the scholars will be presented to the insurance companies who may want to hire them.
IIAP can manage a group of around 20 scholars during one training period. The graduates are hired within the first two months after the end of the training period. That shows the acute need of the insurance industry for talents to fill up the vacant or available positions in their respective companies.
It has been noted that insurance companies are not the priority or top-of-mind companies that new graduates want to join! Even during job fairs, people like to go to the booths of banks, marketing, technology and companies other than insurance. They prefer foreign companies or those with foreign affiliations which they believe will give them opportunities to travel. The insurance industry continues to experience these challenges in enticing or attracting new graduates to join their companies.
Since there are very few subjects about insurance in most courses in the universities, the students have very little appreciation of the business of insurance. Negative image has hounded the industry as well when clients are not happy about claim settlements or when there are insurance companies which were remiss in their obligations to clients. It is just unfortunate that these are the ones highlighted or recalled which contributes to the unpopularity of the industry. The Suits program is a step toward providing the insurance industry with well-trained employees who will eventually spread the good word about insurance. There is available training in the insurance industry so the new graduate need not feel insecure about his lack of knowledge of insurance.
We hope that more graduates will consider joining the Suits program which starts in August this year.