I am a reinsurance broker and want to route my career towards underwriting role. Can you please guide? Thanks -Yash Jani

Hi Yash,

Thanks for your question, and great to hear about your interest in exploring underwriting as a career. The good news is there are a lot of transferable skills from broking which you can apply in underwriting such as understanding the risks faced by a business, being able to communicate well, and managing relationships. This can help make the transition and route to underwriting easier.

Before jumping into underwriting it helps to reflect on what kinds of insurance you have enjoyed working with and what you might like to spend time developing underwriting skills for. For example, deciding whether you want to look after short-tail (property/motor) or long-tail (liability/professional indemnity) type business. Figuring this out will help you in focusing your efforts on the kind of roles you may want to explore. The other consideration is to ask whether you like dealing with numbers or people more. The reason being is some underwriting roles will have more of a 'market focus' and dealing with customers, where other underwriting roles are more focused on the technical side of the role in setting the right price and conditions for the policy you sell. Every underwriter does both, but depending on the role some focus on one part of it more than the other.

I personally really enjoyed my time in underwriting roles and found the experience rewarding. It helped me development a lot of core insurance understanding and skills which have enabled me to take other roles that focus on product management & development. Every day is an opportunity to learn something new in underwriting!

Wishing you all the best in exploring what types of insurance you want to underwrite!
Cheers,
Ben