What challenges do insurance companies face in terms of finding and recruiting skilled/talented IT employees?
Chand, AFLAC: The insurance industry still depends on the mainframe and other legacy-based products and skill sets. The academic world has moved into the newer distributive processing – most educational institutions do not teach or address mainframe technology and its operations. This presents greater challenges for us to recruit for skill sets that are diminishing in terms of supply. It also presents us with strategic opportunities to partner with universities to expand mainframe programming education. A: Gelb, The Main Street America Group: Besides the usual reasons for hiring being tough, special factors make this even more difficult now: an aging COBOL-skilled workforce, “sexier” industries than insurance, deeper pockets on the part of other industries, more-specialized skill needs as IT tools evolve and interact, and a shortage of IT professionals with insurance experience. Dealing with such shortages of skilled talent requires a full spectrum of approaches, including use of recru
