Most insurance professionals expect the retirement of senior colleagues to weaken their firms’ technical and client-facing capability. Very few have done anything formal about it.
That is the central finding of Knowledge at Risk: What Happens When Experience Retires?, a report published on Tuesday by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) New Generation Programme 2025/26 Broking Group. Of the 204 insurance professionals surveyed, 84% expected retirements to have a negative impact on technical and client-facing capability. Only 11% said their organisation had a formal knowledge-transfer programme in place.
The report examines how insurers, brokers, MGAs and other organisations are preparing for the loss of expertise as experienced professionals retire, move on or step back. Alongside the survey, it draws on interviews with experienced practitioners, a review of existing initiatives, and benchmarking against four other chartered professions.
Some of the knowledge most at risk is also the hardest to capture. The group lists technical judgement, relationships and institutional memory. The barriers it identifies are time, resource, leadership focus and a lack of structured succession pathways.
To close the gap, the group proposes an Industry Legacy Framework, bringing together government, regulators, the Financial Services Skills Commission, professional bodies and employers. The framework calls for structured succession planning standards. These include identifying knowledge-critical roles and developing successors early enough to allow meaningful shadowing and handovers.
The group also wants phased retirement to become a professional norm, a Knowledge Capture Toolkit to help firms document expertise, and CPD frameworks reformed so that shadowing and knowledge-transfer activities count as professional development.
“There is a clear readiness among experienced professionals to pass on their expertise, but the right structures must be implemented to ensure that knowledge is retained,” said CII chief executive Matthew Hill.
The findings add to concerns IB UK has reported about the sector’s talent pipeline. Many of the market’s most specialised professionals are at or approaching retirement age, while hybrid working limits the informal learning that juniors have traditionally relied on.
For brokerages, the risk is most visible in the client book. When a senior account executive retires, the relationship goes with them unless a successor has had time to build it. The report’s first steps translate directly into broking practice: identify the people who hold key client relationships, and bring successors into those accounts well before the handover date.
