The LMA's latest Claims Talent Survey raises an uncomfortable question for every managing agent in Lloyd's: what happens when the people who know how to run a genuinely complicated claim retire faster than the market can grow their replacements?
That's no longer a hypothetical. New entrants with under three years' experience now make up 52% of junior roles, up sharply from 37% in 2023 — a jump in just two years. Over the same period, professionals with 15 or more years' experience have fallen from 37% to 31% of the claims workforce. Lloyd's is winning the recruitment battle and losing the experience war, in the space of a single survey cycle. The Lloyd's Market Association's Futures Academy and Apprenticeship Discovery programmes are consistently oversubscribed, LMG data shows — proof the entry-level pipeline works. What the data can't yet show is where the next generation of senior claims handlers is going to come from if the current cohort keeps leaving faster than it's replaced.
That asymmetry matters more in claims than almost anywhere else in the market. Underwriting judgment can be supported by data and modelling tools relatively easily. Claims judgment can't be automated the same way — it's built over years of handling complex, disputed and high-value cases across different classes and jurisdictions, and there's no shortcut to acquiring it. The five-to-seven-year and 15-plus-year experience cohorts are already the hardest to recruit, with candidates chasing senior roles without the background to match, and salary expectations continuing to outpace actual experience levels. Heads of claims most frequently cite two problems driving this: rivals poaching from an already-shrinking pool of experienced talent, and struggling to retain staff after investing in their training.
The survey, a follow-up to the LMA's 2023 study, drew responses from more than half of Lloyd's managing agents, making it close to a market-wide read rather than a concern flagged by a handful of firms
Talent sourcing patterns reflect the structural difficulty. Some 69% of hires are still recruited from within the existing Lloyd's market talent pool, down from 74% in 2023, while recruitment of experienced adjusters with 15 or more years' experience from within the market fell from 22% to 17% over the same period. Recruitment agency use dropped 16% and internal recruitment fell 6%, while LinkedIn as a sourcing channel rose 11%. Outside-industry hiring has shifted away from a previous focus on solicitors toward candidates with transferable skills in data, risk management, digital capability and communication — a broadening that reflects both the difficulty of finding experienced insurance talent and a deliberate repositioning of what a claims professional background can look like.
The LMA findings sit inside a talent challenge that's escalating across the whole London market. Gallagher Bassett's 2026 Carrier Perspective report found talent attraction and retention jumped from seventh to first place among UK insurers' top business concerns in a single year — 72% of UK respondents reported greater difficulty finding qualified candidates, and 48% named claims management and adjusting as facing the most acute shortages of all. A concern doesn't move six places up a priority list in twelve months unless something underneath it has genuinely changed.
The demographic backdrop makes the timing worse — and the trade body's own numbers are sharper than the market-wide figures usually cited. The London Market Group's own research already found as many people over 50 as under 30 working in the market — 24% in each age group, against 18% over 50 and 23% under 30 across financial services generally, making insurance specifically older than its peer sectors, not just old in absolute terms. Its projections point further out: LMG expects the under-30s' share of the workforce to fall from 24% to just 7% by 2034, with the average age rising to 46, even as the market is projected to need around 82,200 people by then. Separate research from RSM UK warns that half of the current UK insurance workforce could retire within the next 15 years, taking decades of underwriting know-how with them, with more than a quarter of London underwriters already over 50. That's the pool the current claims cohort is being drawn from and will eventually be replaced by — and it's shrinking on its own timeline, independent of anything Lloyd's claims teams do. The London Market Group, working alongside Lloyd's, the CII, LMA, IUA and LIIBA, runs a coordinated talent ecosystem spanning school and university engagement, apprenticeships, technical academies and mentoring. That pipeline is clearly generating interest, but it hasn't shown it can fix retention — and retention, not recruitment, is where the risk actually sits.
Heads of claims pointed most often to the pace of technological change and automation, and a perceived reduction in market-wide knowledge and expertise, as the most significant future risks. Data and analytics, technical expertise, customer communication, relationship management, portfolio management and adaptability were named as the skills most frequently cited as critical going forward.
Janine Powell, claims director at the LMA, said the market cannot afford to lose the depth, judgment and experience that sit within mid-career professionals alongside its success in attracting new talent. "It's great we're attracting new talent, and must continue initiatives to do so, but we cannot afford to lose the depth, judgement and experience that sit within our mid-career professionals," she said. Powell said the digitalisation of claims and the right use of AI and automation could free up space for higher-value work and open doors to new technical talent pipelines, but that the human dimension of the claims role remained constant alongside those shifts. "The market's aim now should be to develop claims professionals who can combine technical and human insights, as both are essential to the evolving market," she said.
Read together, the LMA and Gallagher Bassett data point to something more specific than a generic talent shortage: a market that has solved entry-level recruitment and has not yet solved what happens next. The entry-level pipeline works — that's not in question. What's missing is a comparable, deliberate investment in the five-to-seven-year and mid-career cohort: the group most likely to be poached rather than developed, and the hardest to backfill once lost. Left unaddressed, this means a market handling increasingly complex, high-value, disputed claims with a shrinking bench of people who've actually done it before. That points to a clear priority for heads of claims: not another graduate scheme, but structured mid-career retention — clearer progression paths into senior technical and leadership roles, deliberate use of AI and automation to free experienced staff from lower-value casework so their judgment is spent where it matters most, and treating the mid-career cohort as a distinct retention problem rather than an extension of entry-level hiring strategy.
