Broking is a relationship business built on local knowledge, and the people who carry that knowledge are getting older. Brown & Brown UK is responding to that pressure by formalising its retail graduate programme this month. Where previous graduate hiring operated on an office-by-office basis under the Brown & Brown Academy banner, the new structure brings 16 recruits into a single cohort starting this October, placed across six locations in a coordinated three-year rotational scheme covering account handling, broking, claims, sales and placement. Each participant will work towards the Associateship of the Chartered Insurance Institute (ACII) qualification, with study costs funded by the firm as part of a graduate apprenticeship.
The timing sits inside a market under demographic pressure. A survey of 92 brokers conducted by MGA capital partner Mission at the 2026 BIBA conference found that 40% ranked talent attraction and retention as their single most pressing concern, ahead of artificial intelligence, emerging risks and regulatory compliance.
Graduate hiring is moving in the wrong direction at the same time. In the London market specifically, early careers hiring fell 25% in 2025, with the London Market Group forecasting a further 25% decline in 2026. The pattern is relevant beyond the Square Mile: the LMG projects that under-30s could fall from 24% to just 7% of the London market workforce within a decade, a trajectory that regional broking faces in parallel as graduate recruitment stalls across the sector.
The programme is structured around Brown & Brown’s decentralised model. Rather than consolidating graduates into a central cohort, the scheme places them within the regional businesses where they will build their careers, working directly alongside experienced colleagues on live client, insurer and placement activity. The graduates will be based across six locations: Yorkshire, the North West, the South West, Leicester, Belfast and the South East, a mix of regions and cities that reflects the geographic spread of Brown & Brown’s acquired retail businesses.
“Our regional businesses contain an enormous amount of experience and expertise, but, importantly, they are also where the day-to-day work of broking happens," said Richard Jennings, regional managing director at Brown & Brown UK. "We want our graduates to be immersed in that environment from the beginning, working alongside teammates, learning from them and gaining practical experience across the full breadth of the profession.”
The design choice reflects a tension that regional brokers often face. Experienced practitioners who carry institutional knowledge of local markets and long-standing client relationships are reaching retirement age, and there is no automatic pipeline to replace them. Ecclesiastical’s 2024 survey of 250 UK brokers found that 87% cited succession planning as one of their main reasons for wanting to attract younger talent, but half of those same brokers said they were struggling to recruit anyone under 30, and only 55% had a training programme in place to develop the younger staff they did manage to hire.
The graduate scheme is also directly tied to Brown & Brown’s UK consolidation strategy. The group has been aggressively consolidating regional brokers under its One Retail framework, with acquired businesses progressively replacing their independent brand names with the Brown & Brown moniker since the strategy launched formally in April 2024. Growing that network through acquisition creates an immediate need for people who understand the regional markets those businesses serve. A graduate programme that trains within those offices, rather than at arm’s length from them, is one answer to that need.
The three-year rotational structure is designed so that by the time graduates complete the programme, they are already embedded in the regional teams they will continue to work within, rather than entering as outsiders after a centralised training period.
