One wholesale insurance broker has brought its successful training program to Canada, and the key to that success is simple – offering real work with real pay.
“They’re not just here to help do the photocopying, as I think a lot of interns are used for that,” says Gary Hirst, national director of Burns & Wilcox Canada. “And I think that is why those individuals will end up leaving, because they think ‘this is quite boring,’ and they aren’t used for anything substantial. They want to be taken seriously, and receive some true training.”
For many university students, a career in the insurance industry often isn’t top of mind come graduation. For the past five years, Burns & Wilcox has attracted top-talent university graduates through their Kaufman Emerging Leaders Program (KELP), designed to provide hands-on experience and comprehensive training to develop knowledge of the insurance industry and cultivate leadership qualities.
“What we have endeavoured to do is follow the lead of the banks, the pension funds, the money market people – they are very, very good at attracting top talent,” Hirst told InsuranceBusiness.ca. “We need top talent as well; hence the KELP program was born.” (continued.)
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Burns & Wilcox, a managing general agent for retail brokers who encounter difficulty securing cover for an insured in the regular insurance market, currently has some 90 active KELPs in the U.S. and Canadian markets – three of whom are the first Canadians to be selected for the program.
“We are very proud that Krishna Patel, Tommy Ngo and Eric Tu are the first Canadian members of the KELP program,” says Hirst. “We targeted Laurier University in particular for the KELP initiative. We received over 400 resumes from various graduates, and our Human Resources team have spent a great deal of time interviewing; and we believe we’ve managed to attract the crème de la crème.”
Beyond looking for a BA degree, Burns & Wilcox looks for leadership potential during the screening and interviewing process.
“We look for the business administration students. Obviously we want them to have attained their BA,” says Hirst. “But then we then look for some sort of initiative or leadership that those individuals have undertaken while at school. It shows that they have naturally been in a leadership role, and have had some experience in it.”
This year’s recruits, Krishna Patel, Tommy Ngo and Eric Tu, are all Wilfred Laurier University graduates. Patel graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration (Hons.) with a co-op option; Ngo holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (Hons.) with a concentration in Marketing and Brand Communications and a minor in Economics; an Tu obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration (Hons.) with a co-op option and a major in Finance. (continued.)
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And they won’t be bringing coffee and photocopying.
“They are proper employees and enjoy the benefits of an employee. They are paid a very, very competitive salary,” says Hirst. “We have seen that with our competitors, but we don’t believe in unpaid internships. It is taking advantage of these young ladies and gentlemen that we don’t believe is correct.”
The KELP program doesn’t just involve the screening and recruitment process. It is just the beginning, Hirst points out.
“It is for all of the products we offer – we offer in excess of 350 products to our retail brokers,” he says. “We ask the KELPS to go in to a three-year curriculum, and in that period we expose those KELPs to various aspects of insurance and classes of insurance. We then rotate them throughout the company so they have experience in every aspect of what the company does. After those three years, they then get to choose where they would like to start their career and move forward.”
Entering its sixth year, the KELP program has become an essential ingredient for growing quality brokers at Burns & Wilcox.
“Some of the other larger insurers have also got a similar program, so we’re competing against those insurers for the top talent coming out of the universities,” says Hirst. “We find the KELP program essential for our company, because we like to train and develop people in a particular way. So, obtaining graduates from university when they are just fresh out is ideal for us.
“They’ve got almost no experience in a working environment, of insurance, and that gives us the opportunity of training those individuals the way we would like to have someone operate. And we have enjoyed an amazing retention rate among these employees.”
