If ever there was a career in the insurance industry that you thought would never disappear it had to be that of an underwriter. After all, what is insurance other than examining risk and determining whether that risk is worthy of issuing a policy.
So it was interesting to read a Yahoo.com article on high-paying careers with no future and learning insurance underwriter was third on the list. The article is based on numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Louise Tutelian writes: “Blame it on the software. New programs allow underwriters to take on three times as much work as in the past, collapsing the need for more hires. As a result, the BLS projects that the number of people employed in the field will decline by four percent, or 4,300 jobs, by 2018. ‘[The underwriter] just punches in data, and it spits out, say, whether a potential homebuyer is approved or not,’ says Henry Kasper, supervisory economist at the BLS. Growth in the insurance industry isn't exactly exploding either, further undermining the career outlook for underwriters.”
Certainly automated underwriting is a direction many insurers have headed in recent years, so the loss of underwriting jobs is hardly a surprise to anyone in the industry. Software is eliminating jobs in all sorts of industries—not just in underwriting—and will continue to do so as businesses look to decrease their expenses.
There have been steps made toward automating commercial lines underwriting, but that is a beachhead that many insurers will be reluctant to attack, so the feeling here is there will be a market for good underwriters for many years, just not as many of them.
Underwriters shouldn’t be the only people worried about the future, though. The Yahoo article also lists travel agents (I didn’t know we still had these creatures), newspaper reporters (that’s why you’re reading this online), and CEOs. CEOs? I guess the number of corporations in the world is shrinking faster than I thought.