Key insights:
Shielded Insurance Brokers has been named one of Insurance Business’ Top Insurance Employers 2026, an award decided entirely by the brokerage’s own staff. Employees anonymously rated the Sunshine Coast-headquartered firm 75% or higher across 21 workplace categories covering compensation, culture, flexibility, development, recognition and wellbeing. The result arrives on the back of a run of business performance recognition for Shielded, including the #1 ranking in IB’s Top Brokerages 2025 and the Fast Brokerage 2025 title, following Top Brokerage wins in 2024 and 2023.
For co-founder and principal Joshua Scutts, the two kinds of recognition are proof of the same idea. “From day 1, the idea behind Shielded was to challenge the status quo,” he says. “We knew that technology should do the boring work so humans can do the meaningful work. When your brokers aren’t buried in data entry and document processing, they get to spend their day being genuinely useful to clients, and it turns out that’s also what makes people love their job. The employer award and our brokerage awards are two sides of the same strategy.”
That strategy has meant years spent automating the mundane parts of broking, data entry, document processing and policy admin, so staff spend their time on advising clients, handling claims and building relationships. The technology behind that shift is proprietary, built in-house rather than bought off the shelf.
Speaking to IB TV after Shielded’s 2025 Top Brokerage win, Scutts said the business has had automation “ingrained” in it from the start and pointed to an industry still reliant on paper forms and disconnected systems as the reason it mattered.
“If we really simplify what our technology is doing, it’s really just a lot of workflow automation,” he said. “And the reason for that is that the insurance industry is very archaic in its approach. We know our clients want their insurance yesterday when they call us, so what can we do for our team to automate a lot of what they do so we can deliver a really fast and easy experience?”
At Shielded, culture and technology are not treated as competing priorities. Instead, the technology is what makes the culture possible. Strip the drudgery out of a broker’s day, the thinking goes, and what remains is a team that is more energised, developing faster and more likely to stay. Being voted a top employer by its own staff while growing at the pace it has, Shielded argues, is the clearest evidence that growth and people investment are not in tension.
That growth is not abstract. Shielded now employs around 120 people across five locations in Australia, run out of a head office on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
The approach extends to how Shielded builds its team. “We hire for hunger and attitude, then we invest in developing people properly,” Scutts says. “A lot of our leaders today started with us early in their careers. In an industry with a well-documented talent pipeline problem, we’ve found the answer isn’t fighting over experienced talent; it’s creating it.”
Speaking last year, as the brokerage’s headcount passed 80, Scutts described the same philosophy in practice, telling IB TV that Shielded hires “on attitude” rather than holding out for candidates with existing insurance experience, because the reality is it just doesn’t exist at scale.
New starters typically begin in admin roles or personal lines insurance, he said, before working through their tier one training with mentorship along the way, showing them that insurance is a career path and it’s not an industry that you just fall into. Alongside co-founders Douglas Strong and Stuart Brady, Shielded points to internal development as central to that philosophy, with 100% of promotions at the brokerage happening internally.
Shielded frames its growth and its employer recognition as cause and effect rather than coincidence. The brokerage positions itself as proof that technology investment, flexibility and people development function as a retention and growth strategy, not a cost, in a sector facing record switching intent and a structural talent shortage, positioning the two 2026 accolades, employer and brokerage performance, as outcomes of the same underlying decision to remove low-value work from its people’s days.
The recognition also carries a message for the wider market. Shielded is currently hiring, and the brokerage is positioning itself as a place where young, driven insurance professionals can build a career faster than they might elsewhere in the industry, as discussed in our recent coverage of insurance’s ageing broker workforce and shrinking talent pipeline.
Shielded’s model – hire for attitude, develop internally, remove administrative drag – offers one answer to a talent pipeline problem. Fuse Recruitment’s analysis of Australia’s structural insurance talent shortage says the whole sector needs to treat it as strategic rather than reactive and consistent with the full methodology set out in IB’s Top Insurance Employers 2026 report.
This article is sponsored by Shielded Insurance Brokers
