Millennials in Insurance—Transcript

Lynn Oldfield, President and CEO of AIG Canada.

How does AIG attract millennials to the property and casualty insurance industry in Canada? That has not always been an easy question to answer, but the industry has worked very diligently over the last 10 years to make insurance attractive to young professionals.

Training and development is very important to those entering the workforce for the first few years.

AIG has an innovation boot camp program that allows employees from all disciplines to come together in different teams and work on a new product or service innovation, and then they all come together six months into the program to present to a judging panel of senior executives.

Those ideas have created some of the best new product innovations AIG has brought to market in the last five years.

We work closely with all of our employees through ongoing performance conversations. It’s no longer enough to have an annual performance discussion with our young professionals or with any of our employees.

There’s a culture of performance, career development and coaching, and millennials in particular want to know how they’re doing, and they want constructive dialogue on how they can improve their opportunities in the workplace, and certainly their skill sets.

What do millennials bring to the table? A noticeable energy level, a sense of purpose, creativity—millennials bring innovation in their DNA.

They have grown and matured and studied with technology at their fingertips, and they’ve learned through technology, so this is the generation that approaches problems, challenges and strategic opportunities from a place of technology and understanding.

And therefore, they challenge the status quo and they bring a truly different lens to problem solving and to the creation of opportunities.

This story was originally published by Canadian Insurance Top Broker.