Here is a statistic that seems to contradict itself.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment for claims adjusters, appraisers, examiners, and investigators will decline 6% over the next decade. Yet BLS also projects approximately 21,600 job openings every year. Neither one cancels out the other.
Note that the BLS numbers include all insurance claims professionals, not just workers’ compensation. But the broader workforce dynamics should sound very familiar.
BLS estimates there were approximately 389,700 people working in these occupations in 2025. By 2035, that number is projected to decline by about 21,800 positions.
So where do 21,600 openings every year come from?
BLS provides the answer. All those projected openings are expected to result from people transferring to other occupations or leaving the workforce, including retirement.
That means we are facing a future where we need to continually replace an enormous amount of experience walking out or through another door.
The numbers become more interesting when you put them beside workers’ compensation-specific research.
The 2024 Workers’ Comp Industry Insights Survey from Healthesystems and Risk & Insurance surveyed 500 industry stakeholders. Half of the respondents identified workforce recruiting, retention, and succession as a major industry challenge. The report included a comment that should sound familiar: “… adjuster turnover, caseloads are too high. So many things fall through the cracks.” When experienced people leave, the remaining people inherit more work. That higher workload creates stress. That stress contributes to burnout. Burnout contributes to turnover, which further reduces the workforce and starts the cycle over again.
There is some encouraging news, though.
The Jacobson Group and Aon’s Q3 2026 U.S. Insurance Labor Market Study found that 89% of insurance organizations surveyed plan to either increase or maintain their staff size during the next 12 months. About half expect to increase staff. Jeffrey Blair of The Jacobson Group said many organizations appear to be hiring to backfill key positions and bring in new talent rather than simply hiring for growth.
AI is increasingly changing the claims process. AI already summarizes voluminous medical records, assists with documentation, and identifies risks faster and more consistently than humans. It doesn’t take much creativity to identify other uses of AI. Just a look at the mundane or overly complicated tasks still waiting to be automated. If you aren’t careful, you might assume that technology can fill the gap of missing adjusters.
However, Milliman’s 2024 examination of claims department challenges made an important distinction. Its authors described AI as a way to complement the expertise of claims professionals, not replace it. AI processes large amounts of information so people can focus on the issues that most need their attention. It frees humans to do uniquely human things, like show empathy and take context into account. Today’s adjuster is managing information completely differently than their predecessors. They’re also managing more information than ever before. Technology can assist.
But at the end of the day, somebody still needs to talk with the injured worker who is unsure whether they will work again. Somebody must recognize that a straightforward claim isn’t progressing the way it should. Somebody must communicate with the employer, clinician, attorney, nurse case manager, and a multitude of specialized service providers. Somebody must make decisions when the answer isn’t obvious.
Technology can give that person better information, but it doesn’t automatically give them wisdom.
So where do the next great adjusters come from?
Workers’ compensation is an unusual profession because very few kids grow up saying, “I want to be a workers’ compensation claims adjuster.” This industry is filled mostly with people who happened into their role, choosing it without necessarily choosing it. That’s great for the ones who found us, but hope is not a strategy when trying to staff properly.
The good news is that, once you’re here, you’re hooked. There are many disciplines involved in the role of a claims adjuster. Insurance, medicine, law, communication, negotiation, data, finance, return to work, risk management, human behavior, safety, technology, the list is endless. A claims adjuster combines all those unique vantage points into a single purpose: helping someone navigate what may be one of the most difficult periods of their life while fulfilling an obligation to the employer and the workers’ compensation system.
Recruitment to a non-destination is the first part of the challenge. The other part, when they arrive, is how to prepare them. Experience doesn’t transfer through osmosis.
Rising Medical Solutions’ 2023 Workers’ Compensation Benchmarking Study surveyed more than 1,300 frontline claims professionals. It found 72% of organizations provided formal training for new claims hires with little or no experience. The same study found that 87% of frontline claims professionals received ongoing skills training and development. Yet fewer than half strongly agreed that they received enough applicable ongoing training and development to effectively do their jobs. Rising’s research points to communication, active listening, critical thinking, and empathy as soft skills needed to excel in this role. Interestingly, only 38% reported receiving empathy training.
The study also found that only 54% of organizations offered a formal career path with growth opportunities for claims staff. That is consistent with what I wrote about Gen Z (“Gen Z Isn’t Looking for the Exit. They’re Looking for the Ladder.”)
If we need thousands of new people over the coming decade, recruiting them into an entry-level job isn’t enough. We need to show them a career.
For years, I’ve heard variations of the same concern: We’re going to have an adjuster shortage.
Based on everything I’ve shared thus far, I think that description may be incomplete.
What is more important is the experience shortage. You can hire a person, but you cannot instantly hire 25 years of judgment. When a veteran claims professional retires, we don’t simply lose one person from the organizational chart. We potentially lose thousands of accumulated decisions, conversations, mistakes, lessons, and pattern recognitions:
- The claim that looked ordinary but wasn’t
- The physician who needed a phone call instead of another form
- The injured worker whose anger was really fear
- The employer who needed coaching on return to work
- The little warning sign that an experienced adjuster noticed because she had seen it 100 times before
AI can preserve some institutional knowledge, but organizations still must intentionally transfer human knowledge. That means mentoring, structured onboarding, and professional development. That is the exact gap we built WorkCompCollege.com to close. It means giving newer adjusters progressively more complicated situations while experienced professionals are still around to help them understand why a decision was made, not merely what decision was made. It means creating a learning culture before necessity creates a staffing crisis.
Retirements, burnout, and automation are here. But that creates an opportunity – actually … 21,600 opportunities – to find talented people willing to learn and to help others.
This isn’t a dying profession, just one that is going through a unique period of metamorphosis. The organizations and people who seize the opportunity will be the ones still here in a decade. The future of claims may require fewer people doing yesterday’s work, but it also requires a lot of well-trained people capable of doing tomorrow’s work.
