Rutgers student starts Insurance Club to introduce potential jobs, opportunities
The way people find jobs today is very different from even just a few years ago, according to Business News Daily. With the rapidly changing job market, Tommy Sirico, a School of Arts and Sciences junior who is majoring in economics, believed that students were missing out on an entire industry’s worth of opportunities, such as insurance. This year, he recently decided to start the Rutgers Insurance Club because he believed that it would be significant and relevant to students.
“The insurance industry is one that is largely unknown among college students, which is unfortunate because you can easily make Wall-Street type money in it,” he said.
Although insurance jobs are not as glamorized as other financial sector jobs, such as “Wall-Street type" jobs, Sirico said professions in the insurance industry have been “extremely profitable” and is considered the “career trifecta.”
“The jobs are rewarding, stable and limitless,” he said.
Many career development CEOs, including Eli Howayeck, CEO of the marketing consultant Crafted Career Concepts, echoed this sentiment.
“Becoming an insurance salesperson doesn’t have the same panache that machine learning does, but there is a lot of money to be made in selling insurance,” Howayeck said to NBC News.
In fact, according to Indeed.com’s list of “Best Jobs of 2019,” insurance broker placed as the second-best job and insurance advisor placed fourth on the list. As technological sector jobs prevail, though, with machine learning engineer as the number-one best job, Sirico said the insurance industry is facing a large gap in attracting “millennial talent.”
“The industry is currently facing a talent crisis,” he said.
Howayeck confirmed this statement in his comments to NBC, saying that the “average age of insurance brokers is closer to retirement age than college graduate age.”
Rather than viewing this gap as a negative, Sirico saw it as an opportunity for his fellow college students and soon-to-be graduates.
“Not only does this trend emphasize job security for upcoming graduates, but also the opportunity to rise up corporate ladders faster than ever before,” he said.
As cited by a 2019 report on the insurance industry by Deloitte, these professions have been expanding due to national economic growth, higher investment income and rising interest rates.
Sirico specifically wanted to expose others to the wide variety of jobs in the industry, which he felt was not covered by the Actuarial Mathematics Club at the University. He saw that the other club only assists students who are looking to be strictly actuaries, whereas the Rutgers Insurance Club aims to teach students about how the insurance industry works, focusing on all the different career paths rather than just one.
The club will also consist of meetings and networking events.
“We also have speakers come in who have been established as industry leaders,” he said. “We are partnered with top insurance carriers and brokerages who will be hosting and attending networking events with us.”
As for the topics that will be covered at the general meetings, the club will discuss politics and popular trends. Sirico feels that this will be a critical part of understanding how the industry works, and the consequences of current trends on the market.
There are currently 14 students in the club, even though the full functioning of the club begins in the Fall 2019 semester.
