The Columbia Insurance Management program hosted a gaggle of interns sponsored by Boys Hope Girls Hope (BHGH) and the Insurance Federation of New York (IFNY) this summer season to show them about catastrophe threat. During the one-day engagement, Chan and Columbia lecturer Ken Radigan used video and interactive actions to point out the scholars how insurers anticipate and worth for catastrophic exposures, and why capital is necessary to assist keep away from default.
“Our goal was not just to teach them about the basics of insurance business, but also to share the different job opportunities and paths that they can explore in the industry,” Chan shared.
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During the summer season internship, interns did week-long stints on the places of work of varied insurance coverage organizations, resembling Chubb, the Excess Line Association of New York (ELANY), the Life Insurance Council of New York. The internship launched them to the wide selection of alternatives within the world insurance coverage, authorized, and monetary companies sectors.
“[The program] doesn’t cost the children and their families anything. This is the way the insurance industry is giving back to the community,” Chan mentioned. BHGH is a charitable group that gives academic alternatives and profession assets to highschool college students from deprived backgrounds.
Chan was impressed by the eloquence, dedication, and professionalism of the younger interns she interacted with throughout this system. “They came prepared. They didn’t just show up and take up space. Every single one of them had a one-minute elevator speech that was probably better than most of the elevator speeches I’ve heard,” she shared.
The expertise opened Chan’s eyes to the large pool of untapped expertise for insurance coverage. But the insurance coverage world nonetheless has a protracted solution to go in relation to speaking with the incoming technology.
“Our messaging needs to go beyond what people see in media,” mentioned Chan. “What people need to understand is that insurance is not just about the car that crashes, the house that you lose, or the phone that you dropped in the pool.”
Putting insurance coverage into the context of the broader world was an concept that Chan made certain to impart with the interns. “Everything we eat, use, and see in this world at some point involved insurance, and would not exist without insurance. It’s a tool that the world uses to facilitate what we are producing,” she continued.
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The previous punchline that “insurance is boring” additionally must be expunged from the business’s narrative. “Insurance can be very exciting,” Chan mentioned. “I often say that ‘exciting’ and ‘insurance’ don’t usually end up in the same sentence, but when you’ve worked in the industry long enough, and if you talk to the people who have been in it for a long time, you’ll know that’s not true.”
Changing the narrative of the insurance coverage business means professionals ought to take possession of their tales. For Chan, small tweaks in how an worker explains what they do could make an enormous distinction.
Instead of “I work for an insurance company”, saying “I work with renewable and alternative energy projects to help facilitate their financing,” or “I created an insurance product to help banks remove the risks from new technologies” are extra clever methods to talk to the ability of insurance coverage in society, and to entice bold and inventive younger folks to the business.
“We need to talk about insurance the way we want to hear about it,” Chan added. “Some of the messages that we put out need to be conveyed better to build that attraction from the younger generation.”