A report published by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) New Generation Programme 2025/26 Broking Group calls on the insurance profession to take a more deliberate approach to retaining and transferring the knowledge held by its most experienced people.
Knowledge at Risk: What Happens When Experience Retires? examines how insurers, brokers, MGAs and other organisations are preparing for the loss of expertise as experienced professionals retire, move on or step back.
The report combines a survey of 204 insurance professionals with interviews with experienced practitioners, a review of existing initiatives and benchmarking across four other chartered professions.
The findings highlight a significant gap between awareness and action. 84% of respondents expect retirements to negatively impact technical and client-facing capability, yet only 11% reported having a formal knowledge-transfer programme in place.
The report also identifies that some of the knowledge most at risk is the hardest to capture, including technical judgement, relationships and institutional memory. Key barriers include time, resource, leadership focus and a lack of structured succession pathways.
Industry Legacy Framework
The group proposes an Industry Legacy Framework, bringing together government, regulators, the Financial Services Skills Commission, professional bodies and employers to improve how knowledge is retained and transferred between generations. The framework calls for structured succession planning standards, including identifying knowledge-critical roles and developing successors early enough to allow meaningful shadowing and handovers.
Other proposals include making phased retirement a professional norm, creating a Knowledge Capture Toolkit to help firms document expertise, and reforming CPD frameworks so that shadowing and knowledge-transfer activities are formally recognised as professional development.
Matthew Hill, CII Chief Exec, said: “The CII is proud to support the next generation of professionals in delivering research projects such as this. Their work highlights the scale of the challenge facing the profession. There is a clear readiness among experienced professionals to pass on their expertise, but the right structures must be implemented to ensure that knowledge is retained.”
The ‘Knowledge at Risk: What happens when experience retires?’ research paper is available here.