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More graduates will enter risk management straight from school because risk management has broadened its profile, according to HRH's Joel Troisi.

Ask brokers about their higher education and first career ventures, and you tend to discover that few of them thought they'd end up in insurance.

A senior vice president in the complex property unit at the Atlanta office of Hilb Rogal & Hobbs Co., Troisi graduated from the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia in 1998 and has been with the brokerage ever since. His list of accomplishments landed him recognition as a 2007 Power Broker^TM.

This young talent believes he is not an anomaly but a sign of a change beginning to sweep the industry, an increase in fresh college grads jumping straight into the insurance pool.

"The reason you are seeing, I believe, a trend in people entering into the industry at the beginning of their career is due to the fact that risk--not just from an insurance perspective but risk in general

at companies--has an elevated profile," he said. "That is engaging and energizing more individuals to steer their interests toward this industry."

Risks are larger in scope and in cost, and public awareness in insurance has grown since Sept. 11, 2001. Certainly a young person entering a business career would want to choose a field that is important to a large corporation. Enter risk management, a field with arms reaching into many different facets of large corporations, a field that plays an increasingly vital role in a business' operations.

"When the industry is working with local universities in terms of teaching them about the various career tracks available, that's naturally of interest to a person coming out of school," he said. "They want to be in a profile position within an organization, and certainly risk management is a very high profile position."

Specific to the brokerage arena, Troisi said he predicts more college students will consider that particular sector of the insurance industry as a potential career path. "I think if you look overseas versus the domestic market, it is fairly common actually for individuals to enter their career in the brokerage arena, whereas domestically that wasn't really the case up until a more recent time. I think you'll see that trend begin to change."

What will it take to bring even more young people into brokerage? A tag team of college professors and insurance executives, said Troisi.

At the University of Georgia, Troisi said that the faculty did a good job at attracting companies to come visit with students, exposing them to the insurance industry.

"It's a bit of a two-way street in terms of the faculty's interest in engaging companies, as well as the companies' interest in making sure that they maintain a pipeline with that," he said.

Now that the industry has an elevated profile and job titles of "risk manager" and "broker" are becoming more appealing during students' higher education pursuits, the industry needs to see more talented recruits coming in, according to Troisi.

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July 1, 2007

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