What one young Gen Z leader made me think about the future of workers’ compensation.
One of the things I took away from ELEVATE came from a place I didn’t expect. It wasn’t something said by one of the industry’s most experienced leaders. It came from the youngest person on the panel during the session “Confronting the Talent Cliff in Workers’ Compensation and Insurance.”
Her name is Kaylee Bamfield. Kaylee is a college student from Colorado, an accomplished student-athlete and emerging leader who has already been recognized for both academic excellence and leadership. She has a passion for service, personal growth and developing the next generation of leaders. She was on that stage not simply as a representative of Gen Z, but as a young person who is already thinking seriously about the kind of leader she wants to become and the kind of world she wants to help create.
That made me listen differently.
Because Kaylee wasn’t asking us how to make young people fit into the insurance industry we have built. She was asking questions that made me wonder whether we are giving her generation enough opportunity to help shape the industry they are going to inherit.
We talk a lot about the “talent cliff” in workers’ compensation and insurance. We talk about an aging workforce, the number of experienced professionals who will retire, and the enormous amount of knowledge that could leave with them.
Those are very real concerns.
But as I listened to Kaylee talk about entering this industry, I found myself wondering if we’re looking at the problem from the wrong direction.
We keep asking how to get the next generation into our industry? Maybe we should also consider what we willing to let the next generation change about it because that distinction matters.
Kaylee talked about initially seeing insurance as boring. She had grown up around the industry and still didn’t really understand what her father did or the possibilities that existed within insurance.
During the session she asked questions about career paths, mentorship, development and whether an employer was genuinely investing in her or simply trying to fill an open position.
Those questions struck me because they weren’t really questions about a job, but they were questions about belonging.
Is there a place for me here? Can I grow here? Will you invest in me? Will you listen to me? And will there be room for me to become something different than the people who came before me?
That last question may be the one we don’t ask often enough.
My generation has spent decades building careers in this industry. We have systems, processes, traditions and ways of doing things that were shaped by the circumstances of our time. Many of those things exist for very good reasons. And we have an enormous responsibility to pass along what we have learned.
Passing along knowledge doesn’t have to mean passing along everything exactly as we found it. There is a difference between giving someone a foundation and giving them a blueprint they are expected to follow.
I think the next generation deserves the foundation, but they should have a hand in drawing the blueprint. That means we must be willing to let them influence the space they are entering.
They may communicate differently than we do. They may think differently about flexibility, technology, hierarchy and career progression. They may question processes that we’ve accepted for years. Those questions and the uncomfortableness that comes with them also make the system stronger.
Our willingness to explore their perspective doesn’t mean we abandon everything we’ve learned. Quite the opposite. Experience still matters. Institutional knowledge matters. The lessons earned through decades of dealing with difficult claims, injured workers, employers, regulations, relationships and changing markets matter enormously.
But that experience, again, should be a foundation, not a fence.
Perhaps our role as the more experienced generation is to open the door, share what we know, explain why things became the way they are, and then step back enough to let the next generation decide what still belongs in the room.
I was especially struck by the conversation about mentorship.
Mentorship shouldn’t simply be about teaching younger professionals how to do things the way we did them. It can be a two-way exchange.
We teach judgment, context, history and the lessons that aren’t found in a manual. The new generation teaches us what the future looks like from where they are standing.
That is a pretty powerful exchange when we’re willing to listen, and perhaps that is one of the opportunities hidden inside the talent cliff.
Yes, we need to recruit. Yes, we need to retain experienced professionals and transfer institutional knowledge. Yes, we need to make insurance a more visible and attractive career choice, but we also need to make room for new ideas, different approaches, questions, and technology. We need to allow existence for a successful career to be redefined, and perhaps most importantly, room for the next generation to leave its fingerprints on an industry that they will eventually lead.
As I watch a new generation step into this industry, I don’t think our responsibility is simply to make them fit into the world we built. Our responsibility is to give them the knowledge, relationships and confidence to build something we couldn’t yet see.
