I’m often asked how (or perhaps why) I chose to work in insurance—usually by people from outside the industry, not surprisingly.

Knowledge of the business of insurance in this country isn’t good. For most people, insurance means house, car or travel insurance—hardly the most exciting features of life. 

As a result people could mistakenly imagine a career working in insurance to be fairly dull and mundane, based around call centres and statistics tables.

And when it comes to leaving university, you don’t often hear of people queuing up to join insurance firms. This was recently noted in a Post press article. A career in insurance simply isn’t regarded as a mainstream choice for graduates in the way that banking, management consultancy or legal careers are popular.

If I’m completely honest, I’d have taken exactly the same view.  When leaving university I was really unsure what I wanted to do—and was probably staring down the barrel of doing an LPC (Legal Practice Course) and joining the lawyer’s queue. 

I went on a tour of Lloyd’s (I can’t actually remember why) and was really impressed with the whole atmosphere and feel of the place. Quite simply, I had no idea it really existed—it had a bit of a ‘secret garden’ feel to it.

The more I found out about the industry, the more attractive it became.  I’m quite an active person, I play a lot of cricket and am very into climbing—so I wanted to avoid the horrendous hours of many junior City careers.

As it turns out, the London insurance market work generally sensible hours (there are some busy periods), and most people rarely have to stay past 6-7pm. It turns out the pay isn’t too bad and the job does come with some other pretty good perks—personally I’m in it for the corporate umbrellas.

The other cool thing about working in the market is that it’s heavily people orientated. That’s really appealed to me. You tend to bump into the same characters regularly so can build up very solid business relationships fairly quickly.
In many ways insurance is the silent partner in the City—never really acknowledged from the outside. But it plays a far bigger role that you might think.

So far I’ve really enjoyed my time in insurance and would encourage people to do a little research and find out a bit more about it. It’s definitely worth thinking about.