The insurance talent challenge in Asia-Pacific has the character of a pincer movement. On one side, experienced professionals are mobile, expensive, and increasingly difficult to retain in markets where attrition rates have reached double digits. On the other, junior hiring is contracting at precisely the moment the industry most needs to be building its future bench.
The Philippines and Singapore are expected to experience the highest talent turnover in 2025, at 20.0% and 19.3% respectively, with 42% of organisations facing difficulties in hiring or retaining staff and 63% currently dealing with skills gaps across the region. In Hong Kong, 62% of employers cite a skills shortage despite planning to expand in sales, technology, and digital transformation roles. LMA Recruitment's Asia-Pacific data shows that talent competition across the region has been tightening throughout 2024 and 2025, with higher inflation, medical cost escalation, and tighter margins increasing scrutiny on headcounts and budgets - and naturally slowing advancement opportunities for younger professionals.
The explanation most commonly offered for declining junior hiring is generative AI - tools capable of automating the routine analytical and administrative tasks that were once the domain of graduates and early-career staff. But a major new working paper, published in May 2026 by researchers at the University of Warwick, the London School of Economics, and Oxford's Ellison Institute of Technology, challenges this directly. (Their findings are consistent with Gallagher Bassett's Carrier Perspective: 2026 Claims Insights, which identifies talent attraction and retention as a top-three challenge across Australia, North America, and the UK.) The paper - The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring — draws on 243 million new hire records and 407 million job postings across four countries and nine years. Its central finding: when WFH exposure and AI exposure are properly separated in the analysis, the WFH effect is robust and the AI effect disappears.
Junior hiring decline, 2017–2025
Junior share of new hires has fallen sharply across all four countries
Percentage-point change from 2019 baseline — United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia
Dashed lines mark COVID-19 onset (Q1 2020) and ChatGPT release (November 2022). Series are quarterly, seasonally adjusted, reweighted to hold occupation mix constant at the 2019 US distribution. Source: Lambert & Schindler (2026), The Broken Ladder; Revelio Labs.
From LMA Recruitment's 2024 data, 73% of employees in Asia ranked flexible working hours as a top driver of satisfaction, and over half said that hybrid or remote options would make them more likely to stay with their employer. Yet a significant gap persists between employee desires and employer delivery: while 72% of APAC employees want hybrid work options, only 46% currently have access, according to Reeracoen Group and Rakuten Insight Global research.
Singapore leads the region with 68% of employers offering hybrid arrangements, driven in part by government frameworks requiring employers to formally consider flexible work requests. Hong Kong, Japan, and markets across Southeast Asia are following at varying speeds. Insurance - knowledge-intensive, analytically demanding, relationship-driven - sits squarely in the occupational categories where both AI exposure and WFH exposure are highest. The Lambert-Schindler paper would predict that the insurance sector, in markets where hybrid work has been most rapidly adopted, would show the most pronounced junior hiring decline. The evidence from across the region is consistent with that prediction.
Views on AI differ sharply by job level across APAC. While 22% of senior leaders expect AI to significantly disrupt employment in their sectors, only 11% of entry-level employees agree - a divergence that is itself revealing. The people closest to junior roles do not perceive AI as the mechanism displacing them. The people making hiring decisions at the top of organisations do.
The Lambert-Schindler paper's theoretical contribution is particularly resonant for insurance. The paper shows that firms hire junior workers not only for their immediate output, but as an investment in the experienced professionals they will become. That investment depends on knowledge-transfer mechanisms that proximity enables: watching how a senior underwriter approaches a complex risk, how a claims handler navigates a disputed assessment, how a broker builds and sustains a client relationship under pressure.
These are not skills that transfer across video calls with equivalent fidelity. The informal feedback loop — the corridor conversation that corrects a junior's approach before it reaches a client, the observation of how a senior professional handles a difficult moment - is degraded by distributed work arrangements in ways that are difficult to compensate for deliberately and nearly impossible to compensate for incidentally. The paper formalises this as a rise in supervision costs and a fall in on-the-job learning rates that together reduce the return on junior investment and cause rational firms to hire fewer juniors.
For Asia-Pacific's insurance markets, the implication is significant. The sector's competitive advantage rests on the depth and quality of professional judgment - the ability to price complex risks, manage sensitive claims, and maintain long-term client relationships through market cycles. That judgment is not acquired in classrooms or from AI tools. It is acquired over years of observation and guided practice. If the conditions for that acquisition have been removed by hybrid work arrangements, the industry's long-term capability is being quietly eroded.
Asia-Pacific insurance faces a paradox that the Lambert-Schindler research helps to name. Firms offer hybrid and flexible arrangements to attract and retain experienced staff, because the talent market for senior professionals is intensely competitive. Those same arrangements reduce the return on hiring junior staff, because they disrupt the proximity-based development that makes junior hiring worthwhile. The result is a slow-motion hollowing of the talent pyramid: the middle and upper tiers are retained through flexibility, but the lower tiers are not being filled — and in ten years, there will be no middle tier.
Nearly four in ten APAC companies are currently developing or refining their talent programmes around emerging skills needs, with 68% having implemented formal skills frameworks. But formal frameworks are not a substitute for the informal apprenticeship model that insurance expertise has always relied on. The industry is investing in structured skills development precisely because the unstructured, proximity-based development it previously depended on has been disrupted — without fully recognising that the disruption is the cause of the problem it is trying to solve.
The Lambert-Schindler paper's findings hold across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The mechanism - WFH raises the cost of junior development, causing firms to tilt hiring toward more experienced workers — is not country-specific. It operates wherever knowledge-intensive work has moved to hybrid arrangements and wherever firms have not rebuilt their early-career development infrastructure to compensate.
Across Asia-Pacific's insurance markets, this means the practical questions are the same regardless of whether you are managing a team in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Sydney. Does your hybrid policy differentiate between early-career and experienced staff? Have you rebuilt your onboarding and mentoring infrastructure to compensate for the loss of incidental learning that physical co-presence provided? Are you measuring the development outcomes of your hybrid working arrangements - not just employee satisfaction with them?
The answers to those questions, rather than decisions about AI tool deployment, are more likely to determine whether the insurance professionals of 2035 have the depth of judgment, the technical expertise, and the client knowledge that the industry will need. The broken ladder is a management problem. It is one that Asia-Pacific's insurance leaders are positioned to fix.
Peter John Lambert is at the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics. Yannick Schindler is at the Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford. The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring was circulated in May 2026. Insurance-specific data sourced from Gallagher Bassett Carrier Perspective, LMA Recruitment, Aon 2025 Human Capital Employee Sentiment Study, Reeracoen Group/Rakuten Insight Global, and cited Insurance Business Asia reporting.
