Talent over travel: an offer of help if your employer is not supporting your career development

Many years ago, in the early days of my career with a well-known catastrophe modelling company, we were asked by a reinsurance broker to provide a fee for a small consulting project to assess the hurricane risk of properties in the Caribbean.

We sharpened our pencils and gave what was a fair, and by modern standards, cheap proposal to run the models and produce a report that could be used to structure and price a reinsurance contract for millions of dollars of cover.

When we handed it to the broker leading the project his response was “We can’t possibly pay that, it’s more than our travel budget to fly out to see the client”. He wasn’t joking.

Thirty-five years on and I am still encouraging insurers and their brokers to spend money on analytics and learning. And I fear that the priorities may not have changed a lot. Insurance executives are less likely to travel first class these days and instead must make do with business class. The more excessive forms of client entertainment have been curtailed.

Yet I continue to be surprised by how difficult it is for the analysts, modellers and researchers working at insurers and brokers, the people whom organisations rely on to run models and support critical pricing and reinsurance decisions, to get approval for their requests for the relatively trivial cost to attend a two day conference that will dramatically improve their understanding of how to be effective at their jobs.

Building a business is hard, but one of the greatest pleasures is being able to assess a situation and make decisions immediately. Even in a relatively small business such as InsTech, we rarely hesitated to approve a request to spend £500 on an initiative when someone presented a reasonable request for funding.

We are in our second year of running Exponential Risk. This will be the biggest catastrophe modelling, climate and exposure management event outside of the US. We will have an audience of over 500 people, more than 29 companies providing modelling and data solutions and around 300 of those attending will be running models and using data to make key decisions.

We have very strict rules on “pitching” and 90% of our sessions are entirely educational, ranging from updates on the current perils through to how to manage your career and share complex insights to underwriters and senior management. Tickets have been available for £500 or even less for bulk deals and early commitment. With four weeks to go we are delighted to have attendees from the majority of insurance organisations in the UK.

However too often I am still hearing of people who are really keen to attend but can’t get approval in their organisations, or who have to spend a long time trying to convince someone. Sadly, as a result, whilst we celebrate what for us will be a “successful event” there will be a group of deserving and talented people who are not able to attend.

With the benefit of age, experience and having successfully grown businesses I am able to say what others may feel but rarely articulate. One personal gripe is that there are still too many employers in insurance and broking companies today which do not properly appreciate the value of training and supporting people in their career growth and whom are therefore also, I expect, wondering why they are losing good people.

Unlike at the start of my career where I had to accept that British Airways was my main competitor for “share of wallet” at least now I can do something about it.

So, if you have read this far, and are one of those people who wants to come to our event but cannot get approval, I want to offer you a deal, and some advice.

Your line manager may not be the right person to authorise your ticket. Whereas your head of human resources, training and development manager, or someone on your executive team, maybe even your CEO, may have some budget.

Whether you choose to share this article is, of course, entirely up to you, but as a small gift, we’re offering the first 10 people who get in touch a ticket for £500 (£400 off the ticket price), while tickets last and before 1 March, if you contact us and mention this deal. That might help make your case.