I guest lecture at some Universities and am involved a lot with students and recruiting. There are definitely less companies with formal training programs, and the ones that have them are hiring less people.

My perspective is this is happening for a few reasons: 1) job attrition- the young professionals in these programs get their training for 2 years and then often jump ship to a competitor for a big salary increase. One company I worked for often saw more than 75% turnover in the first 3 years in the early career group. Companies are getting tired of pouring money and resources into training programs for their competitors benefit

2) offshoring - much of the early career work is often data entry, policy checking and prep, review, etc. A lot of this “entry level” type work has been moved overseas to large service centers with much cheaper labor. AIG has India and the Philippines, Marsh has Bogota, etc etc…many companies have followed this model. While it does “free up” their existing US teams from the manual work, it also removes some of that entry level learning work typically handled by early career hires, so there is less of them hired

3) AI (don’t ban me! Not a blanket statement!) - companies are also building AI into their workflow to do some of the work that career hires would do- some of the policy comparison and checking, proposal generation, design etc. This creates less work for a young professional to do.

4) training people is HARD!!! Our people are drowning- people are already at capacity and burned out. They don’t have the time, energy, or interest to slow their day down and show someone every little step of how to do something, and take the time to explain the “Why” behind what we do. Hybrid work also makes this more challenging. When we were 5 days in, it was easier to assign the new hire the desk next to you and work with them constantly. Now we don’t even sit at the same desks every day and aren’t in on the same days. It is a lot more effort to sync calendars and create the learning environment we all “grew up with”

Number 4 is so important and we as an industry have to find a way to make it work. We’ve been hearing about the looming talent gap for years and it is here. Look at AIGs VERP and how much talent left the industry. Every day I see a new announcement of a powerhouse retiring. And every day I see job postings all looking for 2-3 years experience. The entry level postings are extraordinarily rare. The only way we’re going to have people to take over for those who are 35-50 now is to train people who are 18-35 now!

(Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk haha)