The protection sector needs to do more to promote the industry as a rewarding career destination to the next generation of advisers as early as possible.
This is according to Naomi Greatorex, managing director of Health Protection Solutions, who was speaking at Protection Review’s ProtectX4 event.
Elaborating on her own experience when starting her 20-year career in the sector, Greatorex (pictured) revealed she had initially worked as a recruiter after finishing her degree.
Disillusioned with how salesy she found the recruitment sector, Greatorex said she applied for a job she found in a local paper for a mortgage adviser before further down the line landing a business development role.
Greatorex added that while she thinks the sector offers a fun and interesting career, it faces issues in getting that message across.
“I think that’s probably the problem with bringing new people into financial services. It’s getting the message out there that it is a really exciting place to work,” she said.
“There’s lots of opportunities in financial services. In the protection industry there’s so many different jobs you can have and it’s a really good place to work to build a career.”
But according to Greatorex, the real problem for the sector is that nobody talks to young people at school about a career in financial services.
“We don’t get financial advisers lessons at school. It’s not something that’s mostly on people’s minds,” she continued.
“I think it’s probably up to us as an industry to raise the awareness of the opportunity – possibly even at school level.
“You can work with some of these charities where they ask different industries to go in and talk to children at 11, 12, 13 years old – I really do think it’s effectively up to us to go and promote the great industry that we all work in.”