Flexibility, New Technology Key To Attracting Young IT Workers part4

Insurers are finding that both newer technology environments and more flexible working environments are keys to attracting top IT talent from younger generations.
By Nathan Conz

On Campus and Beyond

In addition to meeting new IT workers’ expectations, Chubb also is working to ensure that the next generation of tech talent has the skills the carrier needs. The company has established partnerships with universities and colleges as well as internal programs to bridge the experience gap younger IT pros may have in working with certain technologies.

These programs, however, extend beyond legacy technologies, Ring stresses. “We have several niche technologies that we use — for example, PeopleSoft (a 2005 acquisition of Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle) — and it’s difficult to find people to work on those,” she says. “It’s not necessarily a generational thing — it’s more about which technologies people gravitate to.”

For this reason, Ring notes, Chubb has had more difficulty recruiting new workers, but finds retaining that talent less of a challenge. “Chubb’s turnover is relatively low,” Ring reports. “We are not having a big problem from a retention standpoint.”

Through partnerships with schools such as North Carolina Central University’s School of Business and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s School of Technology, Chubb is attempting to influence curricula. The goal is to more precisely equip college graduates with the skills necessary to succeed at Chubb. “It’s so that we can hire people right out of the universities, whereas in the past we might not have done that,” Ring says.

While such external education-centric efforts have helped Chubb expand its pool of potential IT professionals to include recent college graduates, an internal eight-week training program has helped the carrier expand that pool further to include potential workers who may not have a computer science degree. When recruiting, Ring says, the company looks for “theoretical matches,” or potential employees who may not be computer science majors but have backgrounds that lend themselves to learning the craft. The training program then helps them assimilate into jobs outside their educational background.

Over the years, according to Ring, the company has found that certain majors from outside the computer science realm have proven especially adept at developing into IT professionals. “We find a lot of music majors and English majors,” she relates. “We have found over the years that those two majors typically do better than others, obviously in addition to computer science majors.”

The virtues of internal training programs also are extolled by many other carriers, including Cleveland-based Medical Mutual of Ohio and its Antares Management Solutions subsidiary (which does much of the insurer’s internal IT work). Antares established a 12-week training “boot camp” for its newly graduated recruits.

“The thing we try to impress upon the recruits is that making the transition from the academic world to the business world is critical,” says Jason Craft, an Antares HR generalist, in a press document on the training program. “We explain our core business. Executives like [VP, enterprise technology development and innovation,] Paul Apostle explain what we do as a company, not only from a technology perspective, but also from the viewpoint of marketing and finance. We teach recruits the business from a ‘holistic’ perspective.”