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The Australian insurance market spends a lot of energy on emerging risk: climate volatility, cyber, the effect of AI on pricing. The risk that worries me most is more prosaic, and it is sitting inside our own businesses.
Most commentary treats this as a general staffing problem. From where I sit, placing leaders across the industry, the sharper exposure is at the top.
What the numbers show
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| of the insurance workforce reaches retirement age by 2030 | of insurers say a shrinking talent pool already affects growth | rank of workforce risk for insurers, 2025 to 2026 |
What actually walks out the door
When a senior Insurance leader retires, you do not just lose a headcount. You lose judgement that was never written down. The instinct for risk selection, the read on the nuances of a broker, the pricing memory of how a portfolio behaved through the last soft market. That knowledge is tacit, and it does not transfer through a two-week handover.
This is why the talent gap has become a continuity issue rather than an HR line item. A Gallagher Bassett study found that 92% of Australian insurers say a shrinking talent pool is already affecting their ability to manage claims and grow, well above the global average. Workforce has climbed from the seventh-ranked concern for Australian insurers in 2025 to the third in 2026. The market has noticed.
Succession planning has to become market intelligence
Most boards I speak to have a succession plan. Usually, it is a list of internal names against senior roles. In a market this tight, a list of names is closer to a wish than a strategy.
The businesses protecting themselves are doing something closer to live talent mapping. They know who the genuine successors are inside their own walls, and they know who the credible external candidates are across the market, by name, before the seat is empty. They understand where their bench is thin, particularly in the lines where the growth sits, such as emerging and specialty risk, where the experienced cohort is smallest. And they have tested whether their proposition can actually attract those people when it counts.
And then there is the issue of leadership. So many CEO’s I speak to share concerns about genuine leadership ability in the emerging layer of talent – it’s something that is too often overlooked. Professionals being promoted for being exceptional producers into a role where they struggle to inspire, coach, mentor and manage effectively. Identifying leadership traits early and developing them is critical to succession planning in our industry.
That is the difference between reacting to a resignation and pre-empting one.
The single-point-of-failure problem
There is a related risk worth naming. Many insurers and agencies carry one leader who holds the key carrier or broker relationships and the technical history of a book almost entirely on their own. It works beautifully until it doesn't. When that person leaves, a genuine market edge leaves with them.
Building resilience means making sure critical knowledge and relationships sit across a team rather than in a single head. That is a deliberate design choice, and it is far easier to make two years out than two weeks out.
A question for your board
If your chief underwriting officer resigned tomorrow, would your plan B be a verified market map or a gut feel? I would put three questions to any insurance leadership team this year:
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How much of your institutional memory sits inside the 36-month retirement window
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Where is your bench genuinely thin, and are those the lines you are growing into?
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Does your offer still match what the market pays, or are you losing your shortlist at the final stage?
The industry has four years of warning on this one. The firms that treat it as a strategic question now, rather than a vacancy to fill later, will be the ones still holding their portfolio memory in 2030.
