What does an insurance broker do?
In this episode, we discuss how to become an insurance broker, break down the competitive salaries on offer and learn about the importance of social skills and relationship building. Adam O'Leary shares his journey from intern to real estate broker and provides valuable tips for aspiring professionals on networking, securing internships, and using LinkedIn effectively
Participants
- Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
- Adam O'Leary - insurance broker
Transcript
Adam O'Leary: There are loads of opportunity there for people that want to go into insurance again, if you're not a graduate, if you don't go to university, there's also opportunities. Either way, I would say, just get out there. Make the contacts. Look on LinkedIn, look online, apply for the jobs and the world's your oyster.
Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Prospects. I'm your host, Emily Slade, and in this episode, I'm joined by Adam O'Leary. Hello.
Adam O'Leary: I'm Adam O'Leary. I'm an insurance broker. In my off time, I like to play sport. I'm a bit sport obsessed, to be honest with you. And I'm quite a sociable person, you know, like being out and about and to see people, meet new people, that kind of thing.
Emily Slade: Perfect, so what is an insurance broker?
Adam O'Leary: So an insurance broker is basically, as you may well know, an intermediary. A broker is an intermediary bringing two parties together to make a deal in the business world. But in terms of insurance, there's loads of different sectors. And basically you are trying to cover your risk of of doing anything really. So if you, you know, if you buy a house, if you have a house, you need to get insurance cover on that. So that is more basic level. And you you know, you do that on compare the market, or, you know, one of those online sites, Churchill, etc, that's easy. That's what most people know. Or car insurance, you know, you'd go to the normal players and get that, whereas, as an insurance broker, we're looking more to the commercial side. So for me, I'm in the real estate sector. So that is like landlords, policy insurance, but on a bigger scale. So you know, commercial portfolios, investment funds, pension funds, to retailers, that kind of thing. So on a much larger scale, the insurance market in the UK. In London is famous worldwide. We have a lot of what we would call capacity. So we we place a lot of insurance in the London market. And there are so many different sectors, from energy to marine. So marine being boats to aviation and planes to you know, your standard businesses, whether your mum, your dad, works or owns their own business that has to have insurance. You have to have insurance to work. So it can go anywhere. So it spans a whole multitude of spaces.
Emily Slade: Did you choose the sector that you went into specifically?
Adam O'Leary: I kind of fell into it.
Emily Slade: Okay.
Adam O'Leary: So you can move about, but once you start to gain expertise in certain areas, then you tend to, you know, that path just opens up more and more it does become harder then to move sector. I'm not saying you can't like you can move careers in anything, can't you? But once you've gone down a path, you know, you're then starting to get into bigger money and earn better opportunities. And so to then move parts it, you might have to take a step back quite often, you know, not all the time as well, because you might, you might do really well and somehow for you a good role in something else. But, but, yeah, often you have to then start again, learning the expertise, the knowledge.
Emily Slade: So I guess, specific to your sector, what's the salary range like there?
Adam O'Leary: I mean, just in insurance in general, I would, I think a lot of people don't realize that the salaries aren't too far off. Banking. We're in, we're a financial sector. You know, a lot of the jobs are London or city based. We have fairly flexible working hours in terms of, you know, a lot do let you work from home one or two days a week. And in terms of salary, I think starting salary, I think I started it over £16,000 obviously, that was about 10, just over 10 years ago. So I'd expect that to probably be a circa the £20,000 mark now. And that really can span, you know, CEOs will be on hundreds and hundreds of £1000s to you know, your standard you can be anything between £30,000 to £70,000 and then there are always opportunities to push above that as well, if you so desire.
Emily Slade: And, and then would that be different in the different sectors as well?
Adam O'Leary: It can be yes, so, but again, it depends on your your role, how many clients you might have, whether you're an underwriter, which you mentioned at the start, or an insurance broker, you know, it can, it can really vary. So there is to ,to actually give a definition of that would be. It would be hard.
Emily Slade: And in terms of career development, is it a simple path to sort of move up the business to CEO? Or are there different parts you can take?
Adam O'Leary: Yeah, there's all sorts. So if we start with just an insurance. Broker, you know, you'd start as an, usually, as an admin bod. I think in our team, for example, we've got people who do data analytics, because in insurance, you know, spreadsheets are quite key, and data is king. So learning that, knowing that it enables underwriters. Who are an underwriter is somebody who's an insurer who assesses the risk and then basically insures. So if your how, if your house, you know, needed insurance, you would go to an insurer, and then somebody called an underwriter. Would would do that. Underwriter actually came from way back when. I don't know, I wouldn't be able to tell you years, but literally, people. So if you need a boat insured, they would take the boat, they'd put a note up on the board, and you would scribble how much of the boat value you would take on if it did sink. So say 10% of the boat. It was worth 100,000 I'll take on 10% to 10,000 pounds. So you would underwrite your name underneath that, and that's how an underwriter came about. Oh, wow. So it's quite an old an old occasion. And, yeah, it's been going for years. And the City of London, if you go to the Lloyd's of London, there's a really good tour you can do of the Lloyd's London. I think you would need to know a member of Lloyd's. I mean, it was to do that. It's not open to the public, as I understand, but there's a there's a bell in Lloyds of London that gets rang every time a ship has sunk, and that has been a tradition for hundreds of years.
Emily Slade: So does it get rung often these days?
Adam O'Leary: No, to be fair, but I think on occasion, yes, but yeah, it is quite an old tradition, and the writing has been around for generations.
Emily Slade: Yeah, wow. Did you go to university and what did you study?
Adam O'Leary: I went to university and I did business economics.
Emily Slade: Okay.
Adam O'Leary: So I would say my degree was slightly related, but not in no way completely. There is. There's a lot of people in the industry that that do a magnitude of degrees, and there are some that haven't, haven't got a degree at all. And there are opportunities for further learning within insurance. So you get what's called a cert CII, and then you can move up to a CII, and then think it's called fellowship, is the top one, so ability to study and move and progress in insurance. But no, I did go to university and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Emily Slade: So how did you get your job?
Adam O'Leary: I was around 16 just about to go to sixth form and school challenged us with doing two days work experience, and I didn't want that to be with my parents. So I managed to get my mum's cousin, who was an underwriter, and he agreed to take me for two days into London, and he did work within Lloyd so I work separately within Lloyds. I won't explain why, but there is a difference there. And that was when I first saw the bell, and that's when it's a very sociable job, in terms of you getting out of your meeting people. I got to, got to go to a lunch and meet lots of new people, and then I was going around all day, you know, meeting people and stuff like that. So I thoroughly enjoyed it. And that kind of led me into, well, maybe this could be a possibility of a career, or something I could go into when I was pretty certain I wasn't going to make it as a professional sportsman anymore. But yeah, it opened my eyes to that world. And then from that I I got an in in between university years. So in one summer, I had a friend working at a broker, and I I asked them if they had anything going just like an internship at work for free, whatever. So yeah, I ended up doing two or three months working for them in the summer one year. And then off the back of that, they offered me like a placement in two different offices. So it was going to be six months in a local office to me in Colchester, and then six months in their London office. And the one in the London office was in the real estate division. I ended up getting offered the job from both after my two six month placement. So I took the one in London in real estate, and then I've been there ever since, just over 10 years now.
Emily Slade: So what does a day in the life of your job look like?
Adam O'Leary: So that that question would have changed quite dramatically throughout my 10 years. But now my role is a placement broker. So my role is more what we would call market facing so dealing with insurers. So in our team of our real estate team, we have about 130 people now, and my job is to is to build relationships with the insurers, to keep them in check, make sure they're getting stuff to us on time that we can deliver to our clients. So meeting with them a lot, you know, making sure we can get the best possible deals for our clients, and generally, making sure the relationship between the client service team to within our within our real estate team and the insurers, is is good.
Emily Slade: What skill sets do you need for that, both hard and soft skills?
Adam O'Leary: So for me, in terms of a skill set, I would say insurance is very sociable, so you do need to have, you do need that ability to be comfortable in the presence of people. There are more specific people that perhaps sit back from that and are more data analytical, so they don't wait. You don't have to get involved in that side. But thing that opens up or doors for you, if that's something you're comfortable doing. And you know, I think there's a lot of people out there who are similarly like minded to me, that like that kind of lifestyle, and you're not just sitting at your desk. So it is getting out and about, being willing to go and meet new people, make relationships, and then to hold those relationships and keep keep them building throughout time to, you know, continue doing business and grow those that business. So that would be my, I think, I think looking at it, that would be where I see the most benefit to being an insurance and a skill set that you need.
Emily Slade: Yeah, definitely. So what do you love most about your job?
Adam O'Leary: It is the social side. You do get a lot of opportunities to go out to different events, be it a rugby match or be it horse racing or something like that. So you do there are opportunities to do that kind of thing as well as meeting lots of new people, which I really enjoy.
Emily Slade: Yeah. So were there any expectations that you had about your career that turned out differently?
Adam O'Leary: Definitely, you're never quite sure what to expect. Are you when you're sitting there as a youngster dreaming about what life are going to be the world's a tough place. It's not easy. You're not going to get by if you're not willing to get down and do the work. So that's definitely something you have to bear in mind. But I think everyone knows that something that was unexpected was I thought if I had an office based job, I would be stuck at my desk quite a lot, and that has not been the case, and now I actually dream of getting five to 10 minutes to sit at my desk. So yeah, you are in meetings a lot, and then you're having to make up the time, make sure you're doing the notes, doing the follow up pieces from those meetings. So finding that time can be can be difficult, but that's what I enjoy, and it is, yeah, keep, keep sure your toes.
Emily Slade: So what advice do you have for anyone that wants to get into this?
Adam O'Leary: I think go online. There are a lot of internships and graduate jobs available. They took to intakes every year. There is loads of opportunity there for people that want to go into insurance again, if you're not a graduate, if you don't go to university. There's also opportunities. Obviously it does help. There are probably a few more graduate opportunities, but yeah, there is either way, I would say, just get out there, make the contacts, look on LinkedIn, look online, apply for the jobs, and the world is your oyster. There are, yeah, I think there's just the, I think insurance a bit of an unknown world in terms of when you're growing up and thinking about things that you can do future, in your future career, and how many people do you know that would would go "oh I want to be in insurance." And, look, a lot of people fall into it, and it's not, it's not the dream job kind of thing, but, but it earns good money. You won't be far off bankers wages. You do get a social lifestyle more often than not. You can work a nine till five. If you want to really push and progress, you do need to do, you know, graft and put some extra hours in. But you know, it is sociable job. It is you are going to be able to get home and see your family or do your sport or whatever. They're flexible. And I just think that is something that you need to take into having a work life balance. There are jobs out there that you don't get to do that running your own business is tough, and quite often have you have extra stresses that you perhaps work don't get in in the insurance industry, because it isn't that that kind of role.
Emily Slade: Well, thank you so much.
Adam O'Leary: Thank you.
Emily Slade: Thanks again to Adam for their time. For more information on becoming an insurance broker, you can head to prospects.ac.uk. If you've enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify for a full length video version of this episode, check out our YouTube channel @futureyoupod, thank you as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.
Notes on transcript
This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
Find out more
- Learn more about becoming an insurance broker.
- Take a look at the role of an insurance underwriter.
- Explore graduate finance jobs.
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