Until last December, the FCA required staff involved in non-investment insurance distribution to complete at least 15 hours of CPD a year. Many firms still set a number of days in the office. For Matthew Hill (pictured), chief executive of the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), neither measure tells a business whether its junior people are learning.
Speaking ahead of the CII’s Shaping the Future of Insurance conference, Hill was asked how junior brokers build judgment as AI takes on entry-level work. He argued that being close to experienced leaders helps juniors develop "this judgment, this sixth sense, this intuition".
But the premise itself is in question. "I worry that we have walked without very much challenge into a set of assumptions which we all now believe to be true," he said. "And I'm not sure that they are. And one of those assumptions is that the advance of AI has had an impact on what we all call entry-level jobs."
He pointed to a University of Warwick CAGE working paper covering 243 million hires and 407 million job postings across four countries. The share of new hires going to junior workers had fallen roughly 8 to 11 percentage points below 2019 levels, but when the researchers examined AI and remote working together, the link with remote working remained stronger.
Hill believes employers’ initial reluctance to hire because of uncertainty about AI "has dropped off very sharply", while the structural impact of COVID on the workplace has remained. "It is about making sure that we are creating the right opportunities for new entrants to the sector to be with and observe leaders," he said.
He recalled telling a panel at a CII NewGen event the day before that "leadership is critical to the success of any business, but leadership unobserved is pointless." That puts the onus on leaders to treat their influence on younger colleagues as part of their role. “I have a duty and I have a responsibility to transmit that leadership to those younger people,” Hill said.
That does not necessarily mean mandating office days. "I don't think the answer is to say to people, you must be in the office 4 days a week," he said. "I think that rules-based approach misses the point."
He is equally clear about what flexibility has made possible. He described telling colleagues with caring responsibilities they can come in at 10 and leave in time for the school pickup: "I'm not gonna measure you by the minutes you spend at your desk." In his previous job, the same thinking let him bring in disabled colleagues who had given up on returning to work because of pre-COVID ideas of what a workplace was.
What remote working risks losing is the unscripted side of work. "In the world of remote working, I worry that colleagues become relegated to their job descriptions," Hill said. Leaders, he argued, "need to create the environment in which the conversations are heard, the behaviours are observed, the vibe is transmitted".
For a trainee, that could mean hearing an experienced broker question a client, handle a difficult renewal or push back on an underwriter. None of that is in a job description.
The same logic applies to training. With the 15-hour minimum gone, firms must still ensure and monitor staff competence, but how they do it is largely theirs to decide. Fixed hours risk turning professional development "into a chore, into a set of rules that have got to be obeyed", Hill argued, when professionals should be able to judge what learning they need. The CII's own scheme still requires qualified members to complete at least 35 hours of CPD a year, although the activities it counts already include on-the-job training, training others and voluntary work.
He wants instead to "broaden our definition of CPD so it encompasses things like peer learning and mentoring and giving things back to the profession". For senior people, that makes passing on experience part of their own development rather than something squeezed around it.
The concern about remote working extends beyond hiring to what juniors may miss once they are in the job. "We need to find ways to replace the old kind of opportunities that younger people had to observe leaders, to hear the language they use, to observe the behaviours that they express towards others," Hill said.
The CII's sixth Shaping the Future of Insurance conference takes place on Thursday 1 October 2026 in the City of London.
