While labor shortages in construction and the trades have commanded the lion’s share of headlines in recent years, the fact is virtually no industry is immune to the challenge of replacing the mass labor-force losses brought about by the exodus of retiring baby boomers.
Even white-collar industries are finding it difficult to maintain sufficient numbers to keep up with market demand. Just ask anyone in the insurance business.
“The honest answer is the industry is really not seeing enough new people come in to replace what I would say is the graying population of people that are getting ready to leave,” said Kelley Erstine, CEO of Independent Insurance Agents of Arkansas. “I know that’s the way it is in a lot of industries but especially in insurance. Short answer, the insurance workforce actually shrunk in 2025, and that’s really been the first decline in several years.”
Kelley Erstine
Multiple industry watch groups all report the same thing: Personnel represents the insurance industry’s primary structural challenge for the next decade. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that about 50 percent of the current insurance workforce aged 55 and older will retire by the early 2030s, creating a vacancy glut of about 400,000 insurance industry positions.
Zippia notes the average age of insurance agents currently on the job as 46 years old, four years older than the national average across all workers. Broken down further, agents 20 to 30 years old represent only 11 percent of the agents in business today, and 23 percent are between 30 and 40 years of age.
Of those who do join the profession, the lion’s share are older, often jumping from other fields later in their career. As Accenture notes, over the past decade, the number of insurance professionals aged 55 and older has increased by approximately 74 percent.
“If you poll a lot of insurance agents, they will tell you somewhere in the course of that conversation that they didn’t expect to be in insurance,” Erstine said. “A lot of times, [what attracted them] is they happened to come upon someone who said, ‘Have you considered insurance?’ That still seems to be, to some degree, the way it is.”
At the same time, opportunities within the industry have arguably never been greater. LIMRA reported that only 52 percent of Americans have life insurance, including individual and workplace, meaning there are 102 million uninsured and underinsured Americans who need policies. Fewer professionals mean less competition for those dollars, and there exists additional opportunities for women and minority agents, who may find it easier to establish a sales beachhead among customers who feel more comfortable dealing with someone who looks and talks the way they do.
“Agencies look for folks like that because they represent somewhat of a special niche of business that maybe is not being represented,” Erstine said. “When you look at the general population here in the state of Arkansas, there is a heavy, heavy Hispanic representation, and so we’re seeing more Latinos go into the business just because of that. I would say the same goes in the African American population because a percentage of customers are more comfortable with that person behind the table having some very serious financial discussions.”
With such a good story to tell, Erstine said the Big I and others are redoubling their efforts in Arkansas when it comes to making a case for people to consider a career in insurance earlier in life.
“There are some things going on that I think attracts a younger population and provides a better education about getting into the insurance field itself,” he said. “The normal train of thought way back was, ‘Oh, insurance; I’ve got to sell. I’ve got to cold call, I’ve got to knock on doors.’ That is not the case anymore.
“For example, the University of Central Arkansas [in Conway] has an insurance and risk-management program, the only degree program in the state of Arkansas. The students who come out of that program have 100-percent job placement when they get out. It’s not just deer-in-the-headlights-wide-open when they go into an agency or with a carrier. They’re doing a great job of that.”
Earlier education and formal training, it is hoped, will cut into one of the thorniest issues concerning new people in the industry, that being the current high degree of turnover among those who do give insurance a go. Currently, 30 percent of new agents leave in their first 90 days, according to Podium, while greater than 90 percent of new agents quit the business within the first year, and more than 95 percent drop out by the five-year mark, Investopedia reported.
Dennis Bost, longtime State Farm agency owner in Little Rock, said those numbers show the culture shock most new people succumb to after getting into the field.
Dennis Bost
“It’s a really rewarding career, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that it takes time to build up a clientele with insurance,” he said. “It’s not something that you’re going to walk into and you’re making really good money right away. You have to think of it as that eight years that you would’ve been going to med school, that’s about how long it’s going to take you before you really start making good money in insurance.
“You also have to have a really good mentor to help you get through it. When you have [agent dropout] rates that are as high as we have in insurance, if you don’t have a really, really good mentor and a strong base and a good company backing you, it’s just really hard to make it.”
Of course, there is never a good time to see the levels of attrition that are being seen in the insurance ranks these days, but one positive ray is the current situation is playing out during a favorable technological era.
“I don’t personally believe [artificial intelligence] is going to just take over the world like what people think,” Bost said. “What I think it will be able to do is make it easier to check expenses, check and make sure your people are having the conversations that you want them to, and to track where your referrals are coming from,” he said. “The data processing kind of stuff will change, and I also think that actuaries crunching numbers and doing manual calculations, that’s going to change with AI, as well. It should make rates be more competitive moving forward for all insurance companies as they figure that out.”
Bost said emerging technology may allow insurance professionals to become more efficient than in the past, clearing some of the back-office clutter, but people-centric skills are still the real difference between success and failure in the industry.
“The two things that are really hard to teach that are very important to be successful in the long haul are self-awareness and empathy,” he said. “If they, as an adult, haven’t learned those things or don’t have those things built into them, it’s really hard to coach. What we do is not like selling widgets; it’s not like going out and selling a tangible product per se. What we’re doing is listening to people’s background, getting their story and then matching them up with the things that they need.
“If you don’t know how to have in-depth conversations with people, then I don’t think you can be successful in this industry moving forward.”
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