Industry Insights

The Future of Insurance Talent – Part Two

A Three-Part Series on Preserving Knowledge, Modernizing Operations, and Preparing for the Next Generation

Part 2: From Experience to Process: Preparing Insurance Operations for the Next Generation

Part 2 of a three-part series examining how the insurance industry’s workforce transition is reshaping operations, knowledge management, and technology.

It’s Monday morning, and your most experienced commercial underwriter has retired after thirty-two years. By lunchtime, someone asks why a particular underwriting exception exists for a long-standing agency relationship. No one knows the answer. The decision was never documented. It lived in one person’s experience.

This scenario is playing out across the insurance industry as experienced professionals retire and organizations discover that some of their most valuable knowledge was never written down—it was embedded in people, not processes.

The challenge is particularly significant in insurance, where decades of experience often influence how work gets done. Underwriters, claims professionals, compliance specialists, and other accumulate knowledge about decisions, exceptions, and procedures that may never be formally documented.

As the workforce changes, insurers have an opportunity to examine where that knowledge resides and how effectively it can be transferred. Preserving institutional knowledge does not mean attempting to document every decision an experienced employee has ever made. It means identifying the expertise that is critical to the business and translating it, where appropriate, into processes, business rules, guidelines, and workflows that can be consistently understood and applied by others.

When Knowledge Lives with the Employee

Every organization has employees who become the unofficial experts on particular processes. They know which steps need to happen, which exceptions require additional scrutiny, where information can be found, and whom to contact when something goes wrong. Their experience often allows them to navigate processes efficiently, even when those processes are complex, inconsistent, or poorly documented.

That expertise is extremely valuable — but relying too heavily on an individual to keep a process functioning can create significant operational risk.

The problem extends well beyond insurance. Deloitte reports that 92% of surveyed organizations fail to consistently capture knowledge from employees approaching retirement, highlighting the gap that can exist between recognizing the risk of knowledge loss and actually preparing for it.

For the insurance industry, the problem can surface in seemingly routine ways. An underwriting exception may require approval from someone who understands the history behind the rule. A claims process may depend on an adjuster remembering a step that is not included in the formal procedure. A monthly accounting reconciliation may rely on a spreadsheet maintained by one employee. A regulatory requirement may be handled correctly because a long-tenured employee remembers what a particular state requires.

As long as those employees remain available, the processes may appear to work. But when those employees leave, their departure can expose gaps that were there all along.

As experienced professionals prepare to leave the workforce, insurers are increasingly focusing on structured knowledge-transfer programs designed to capture critical expertise before it leaves the organization. These efforts can include documentation, playbooks, mentoring, and other formal mechanisms for transferring knowledge from experienced professionals to the employees who will follow them.

Tribal Knowledge Isn’t a Strategy

While institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge are closely related, they are not the same thing. Institutional knowledge is an organizational asset—the accumulated expertise, history, and understanding that help a company operate effectively. Tribal knowledge becomes a risk when important information resides primarily with certain individuals or groups rather than being accessible to the organization as a whole.

In practice, tribal knowledge often reveals itself through familiar phrases: “Ask Susan; she knows how that works.” “We’ve always handled it this way.” “There’s a spreadsheet for that.” “Only accounting knows how to fix it.”

Those workarounds may seem harmless when experience employees know exactly what to do, but they create operational dependencies that become difficult to sustain as employees retire or leave. The goal isn’t to diminish individual expertise; it’s to ensure that critical business knowledge belongs to the organization as well as the individual.

From Knowledge to Repeatable Process

Capturing institutional knowledge begins by identifying the processes most dependent on individual experience. Insurers can then determine which elements should be documented, standardized, incorporated into business rules, or built into repeatable workflows.

This process requires more than creating procedure manuals. Documentation can explain what employees are supposed to do, but effective knowledge transfer also requires examining how work actually moves through the organization.

Why does a particular risk require additional underwriting review? When should a claim be escalated? Which approvals are required before a policy can be issued? Where are exceptions documented, and who has authority to approve them?

Answering questions like these allows insurers to transform individual experience into organizational capability.

Standardization is an important part of that transition. When routine processes, decision points, approvals, and exceptions are clearly defined, employees do not have to rely solely on memory or informal guidance to determine what happens next. New employees can learn more quickly, experienced employees can focus on situations that genuinely require their judgment, and organizations can apply business practices more consistently.

Further, standardization does not mean eliminating professional judgment. Insurance will always require expertise, particularly when risks, claims, and customer circumstances do not fit neatly within predefined rules. Instead, well-designed processes create a framework within which professional judgment can be applied where it adds the greatest value.

Modernizing Operations for a Changing Workforce

Preserving institutional knowledge also gives insurers an opportunity to reconsider processes that may have developed over many years. A workflow that made sense when it was created may now include unnecessary manual steps, duplicate data entry, spreadsheets, email approvals, or workarounds created to accommodate limitations in legacy systems.

Simply documenting those processes preserves the problem along with the knowledge.

Instead, insurers can use the workforce transition as an opportunity to reconsider how work gets done. Deloitte notes that insurers are increasingly streamlining legacy processes and technologies as part of broader efforts to improve standardization, efficiency, and adaptability.

This raises a more important question: If we were designing this process today, how should it work?

That may mean simplifying workflows, eliminating redundant steps, clarifying responsibilities, establishing consistent approval paths, and determining where automation can reduce administrative work. It may also mean identifying where experienced employees’ judgment is essential and where routine decisions can be supported by clearly defined business rules.

The objective is not to replace experienced professionals with processes. The goal is to capture what the organization has learned from them and use that knowledge to build operations that are easier to understand, easier to teach, and more resilient when people change.

Technology Can Help Put Knowledge Into Practice

Documentation preserves information. Technology can help put that information into practice.

Modern insurance platforms can incorporate established business rules, workflows, approval requirements, forms, and other operational practices directly into the systems employees use every day. Rather than expecting employees to remember every step or consult separate documentation, the process itself can help guide the work.

This approach extends beyond insurance. Info-Tech Research Group recommends embedding business rules, analytics, and other decision-support capabilities directly into workflows to create more consistent, automated, and traceable business processes.

For example, an underwriting workflow can automatically route certain risks for additional review, identify required information, apply established authority levels, and incorporate state-specific requirements into the process.

Used effectively, technology does not replace institutional knowledge or professional judgment. It helps organizations apply both more consistently.

For insurers facing a generational workforce transition, that distinction is important. The objective is not to remove people from the process. It is to give the next generation of insurance professionals access to the accumulated knowledge, processes, and tools they need to make informed decisions and become productive more quickly.

Building Operational Resilience

The retirement of experienced professionals does not have to mean the retirement of their knowledge. Insurers that begin identifying critical expertise, documenting why processes work the way they do, and translating proven practices into repeatable workflows can retain the institutional knowledge that helped shape their organizations.

Doing so also creates benefits that extend beyond succession planning. Clearer processes can improve consistency, reduce operational dependencies, simplify training, strengthen accountability, and give experienced professionals more time to focus on complex work that genuinely requires their expertise.

Ultimately, successful knowledge transfer is not about preserving the past exactly as it was. It is about taking what an organization has learned and using it to build a stronger operating model for the future.

In Part Three of The Future of Insurance Talent, we’ll explore the role modern insurance technology can play in that operating model—and how the right systems can help insurers combine institutional knowledge, automation, and human expertise to prepare the next generation of insurance professionals.

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