When Australia’s inaugural Lloyd’s Development Group (LDG) Study Tour took off for Asia in October, it looked, on paper, like an ambitious professional development exercise: two weeks, four markets, a packed schedule of boardroom sessions, site visits and networking. But behind the logistics sits a much bigger agenda – using international exposure to convince early-career professionals that insurance is not just a job, but a globally mobile, intellectually rich, long-term career.
The spark came from Gallagher Re’s executive director - deputy head of broking, Sophie Lancaster, who saw first-hand in London how study tours can shape careers and cultures. “Sophie had this brilliant idea to initiate a study tour for the Australian market,” said Gerrie Johnson, property treaty underwriter at Munich Re, who spoke with Insurance Business in her capacity as an LDG committee member. Johnson, and fellow committee member Lancaster, led the tour together with Sam McNally from Wotton Kearney.
The idea – borrowed from a tradition London has nurtured for decades – has now been recast for an Australian market grappling with recruitment challenges and a looming leadership gap.
The LDG Study Tour gathered 18 emerging professionals from across broking, underwriting and reinsurance, all backed by sponsoring firms willing to invest in a bold experiment. Over two weeks, they moved through Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and Hong Kong, meeting senior executives from global and regional players, diving into casualty trends, catastrophe claims, financial lines, agri (re)insurance and insurtech and visiting operations like Kia’s EV plant. Just as importantly, they were visible as a cohort: a travelling showcase of Australian talent.
The Australian insurance sector has long worried about its talent pipeline: too few graduates, competition from better-known industries and a perception that career paths plateau locally unless you move overseas. The study tour is a direct challenge to that mindset.
“The whole premise, particularly with the study tour, is about being ambitious for the Australian market and the idea that we can have really interesting careers here,” said Lancaster.
By exposing delegates to some of Asia’s most sophisticated insurance markets while they remain anchored to Australian employers, the tour reframes international experience as additive rather than extractive. This is not about exporting bright people and hoping they come back; it is about showing them that genuinely global careers can be built from an Australian base, in dialogue with Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and Hong Kong rather than in competition with them.
That matters in the current recruitment environment. Younger professionals increasingly want purpose, mobility and visible investment in their growth. The LDG model gives sponsoring firms a concrete, high-impact development experience that goes far beyond a training module or conference ticket.
“We think the study tour initiative is a really strong opportunity for companies that are investing in people and trying to help them build a career – the company and their talent developing together,” said Lancaster.
The organisers are already looking to 2027 and, over time, to a cadence that makes the tour an expected feature of the industry’s development architecture.
“We don’t want this to be a one and done exercise,” said Lancaster. That long-term intent could turn an experiment into infrastructure – something graduates and early-career hires can aspire to and employers can embed into their retention strategies.
If the technical learning and international market exposure are the obvious benefits, the less visible – but perhaps more powerful – outcome lies in the relationships forged within the group itself. Delegates spent months preparing before departure, then two intense weeks in shared meetings, site visits, flights, meals and cultural experiences, from hawker centres and river cruises to karaoke and skyline networking events.
That immersion has created a cross-market, cross-company peer network at exactly the level where the industry’s future leaders are emerging.
“In addition to all the technical knowledge from the study tour and the networking within Asia, a really important part is the networking within the cohort,” said Lancaster. In an industry often fragmented by line of business, employer and geography, that kind of horizontal connectivity is rare – and strategically valuable.
The deliberate decision to cap the group at a manageable size reflects this focus on quality over volume. Eighteen was enough to represent a broad slice of the market but small enough that everyone knew each other well by the end and that host boardrooms could accommodate them without turning sessions into lectures. The aim is not to industrialise the experience but to make it a recognised, competitive marker of emerging leadership – something that signals both potential and commitment.
The tour leaders agreed that it feels like they’ve found an optimum sustainable number that balances impact, logistics and the quality of the experience.
All of this is underpinned by a strong regional narrative. Australian delegates are not just passive recipients of knowledge from Asia; they are ambassadors for a market that wants to punch at its true weight. The tour makes that ambition tangible: walking into rooms with senior decision-makers at global reinsurers, regulators and specialist firms shows young professionals that their voices and questions are welcome in the regional conversation.
For an industry that rightly worries about who will lead it in 10 or 20 years, the LDG Study Tour offers one blueprint that can help create those leaders. It also connects technical learning with lived international experience, wraps that in a tight cohort network and signals clearly that there is a future worth staying for. It’s a strategic bet that if you show people the full scope of what a career in insurance can be, more of them will choose to build that future here – in Australia, with Asia on their doorstep and the world in their sights.
