Hub teams with Empire to train brokers

There has been growing concern in the insurance industry for the past few years that recruitment levels have fallen short of expectations. With the current cohort of insurance brokers rapidly approaching retirement age, Canadians could soon struggle to find a qualified agent.

To address this problem, Hub Financial is teaming up with Empire Life to launch a “New Broker Training School” — a five-day, classroom-based “boot camp” for new advisors interested in adding insurance to their offering shelf.

“It’s a pretty obvious glaring problem, that there’s a relative lack of youth in the industry,” says John Lutrin, Hub’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “We’ve got over 3,000 brokers across Canada and the average age is 57 years old. It’s clearly a trend that we have an aging demographic and have fewer young advisors entering the industry.”

While a shortage of brokers may drive up demand for the services of existing brokers, the down side for them is a paucity of potential buyers when the time comes for them to sell their insurance business.

“We have over 3,000 advisors who are aging, many of whom are looking for a succession plan to hand off to,” he says. The Hub/Empire training system hopes to create a “nursery” of new brokers who will become the market for retiring advisors seeking to sell their business.

In “the old days” insurance carriers performed much of the recruitment and training through their career development programs, but the career shop model was abandoned by most of the major carriers in the late1980s and early 1990s. While there are still a handful of career shops, recruitment into the industry as a whole remains slow.

“We really believe that we may be able to set a trend here, getting MGAs on board and seeing the need of recruiting young blood into the industry,” says Lutrin.

The classes will be offered once per quarter, based on a minimum enrolment of five students, across the country in the regional offices of either Empire or Hub. Lutrin says the costs should not be significant and will be shared by Hub and Empire.

The training will be geared toward practice management, training new brokers in selling the concept of insurance, rather than specific products.

Empire will provide the in-class “boot camp” training to kick start the new brokers’ knowledge base. After graduation from the classroom portion, Hub will step in to provide the grooming and mentoring needed to keep the new brokers on track.

Lutrin admits there is a risk that these new brokers could walk away from the firms that provided the training, but says what’s good for the industry will be good for his company in the long run.

“Sure we’re going to spend the time and the money, but we see ourselves as one of the bigger MGAs in the country and have an obligation to the industry as a whole,” he says. “In the long run, everyone will benefit if we bring in a new generation. Hopefully we can serve as some sort of pioneer in this trend and others will follow suit.”

Filed by Steven Lamb, Advisor.ca, steven.lamb@advisor.rogers.com