Small brokerages that have held off hiring a school leaver because they have no HR team to sort out the paperwork now have a guide from the profession’s peak body.
NIBA CEO Richard Klipin launched an internship guide on Monday, opening the 2026 NIBA Convention at RACV Royal Pines on the Gold Coast. The guide was written by NIBA’s Insure Your Future committee. It sets out the employment rules, HR obligations and a structured first career pathway for a young recruit.
“It’s kind of the chapter and verse on bringing someone young into your business,” Klipin told delegates. He said it was aimed at principals who “may not have an HR department” and aren’t confident about the legal detail.
The committee behind the guide is co-chaired by NIBA board director Steven Hill. Klipin linked the launch directly to the late Tim Wedlock, a founding member of Insure Your Future.
Read next: Recruitment challenges: What’s NIBA’s new strategy?
Wedlock was executive chairman of AEI Insurance Broking Group and a former NIBA president. He died suddenly in the United States in August, after 39 years at AEI. NIBA called him a giant of the profession, and ANZIIF later gave him a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award.
“When Tim saw a problem, he wanted to solve it,” Klipin said. The problem Wedlock and fellow broker Cameron Sheild took on when Insure Your Future launched at the 2023 convention is still a live one: “How do we make broking as a profession a place where young people can choose?”
NIBA’s own figures show how pressing that question is. Its Data to Direction report, released in June, found brokers aged 18 to 29 make up just 11% of the profession. That is the same share as brokers aged 60 and over, and the median broker is 44. The Insurance Council of Australia has separately warned that close to 30% of the industry workforce will reach retirement age by 2030.
Read next: SA/NT broker awards go to Guardian and Astute in Adelaide
Entry rules make the gap harder to close. Newcomers don’t need a degree, but they do need a Tier 2 accredited qualification, which is usually completed on the job. That means small firms carry most of the cost of training new starters. The internship guide is meant to make taking that first step less daunting.
The outreach continued during the convention itself. A group of 23 Year 10 and 11 students from Emmanuel College in nearby Carrara was due on site later on Monday for a first look at the profession.
Klipin opened his address on a more sombre note, describing the broking community as “very tribal”. He paid tribute to Wedlock and to colleagues lost last year, including former NIBA board director Greg Vlahos. “We stand together. We celebrate. We mourn. We grieve,” he said. “But we also then forge ahead together through good times and bad.”
The room he was speaking to was the biggest NIBA has drawn in recent years. Klipin put the headcount at between 1,014 and 1,017, up from 890 delegates last year. He also had some fun with former NIBA president Gary Okely’s well-known habit of rounding numbers up. “That’s the actual number, so I’m not rounding up on that one,” he said.
The program runs to more than 30 sessions and 70-plus speakers across three pathways. That includes the convention’s first dedicated stream for young professionals, which opened with masterclasses on Monday morning.
Read next: NIBA builds a convention pathway for early-career brokers
Klipin said the association’s research push began with advice from Okely when Klipin took the job: if brokers wanted to make their case, they needed hard evidence. Over the past 18 months NIBA has published three reports. The first set out a roadmap for the decade. The second gathered clients’ views of their brokers. The third, Data to Direction, found brokers place $35.6 billion in premium, about 46% of all general insurance written in Australia. A fourth study, on how people train for and enter the profession, is also underway.
Technology is the next subject. NIBA’s research on tech and AI is due out on the convention’s final day. Klipin said it would focus less on how brokers feel about AI and more on what they are doing with it.
To get a quick read of the room, he asked who was already using AI or AI agents in their business. Plenty of hands went up. Klipin said that was a clear change from a year earlier, when most brokers were still watching from the sidelines.
Read next: NIBA to release final 2027 Code at sold-out Convention
Clients may be ahead of them. Vero’s 2026 SME Insurance Index found 55% of businesses were comfortable with their broker using AI to support insurance processes, while APRA warned in April that AI governance was not keeping pace with adoption.
The final 2027 Insurance Brokers Code of Practice is also due for release during the convention, giving delegates plenty to talk about before Tuesday night’s awards.
Klipin closed by thanking the convention committee led by Lynette Walsh. He said the event takes nine to ten months to put together, and around 150 volunteers serve on NIBA’s boards and committees. He also thanked the activation partners, whose puppies and goats were still turning up despite the weather.
He asked delegates to send in ideas for next year. “You can never rest on your laurels,” he said. The weather, he conceded, was the one thing the committee couldn’t change.
