More than half of insurer CIOs say attracting and retaining talent is a top challenge. Even so, many insurers don’t prioritize talent effectively against other pressing needs. In its Novarica Impact Award case study, COUNTRY Financial showed one way that insurers can cultivate talent for recruitment while simultaneously leveraging it for innovation.
COUNTRY won an Impact Award in the IT Practices category for its DigitaLab, a partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Interns from the DigitaLab worked with several COUNTRY Financial IT resources to move two apps from WebSphere Application Server to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
The project enabled COUNTRY to consolidate its platforms and saved nearly $40,000 in vendor costs. The students gained experience in project management and more than 550 hours of programming experience in back-end and front-end cloud development.
Finding top talent is a must for insurer technology organizations, but it can be difficult to compete with tech firms, and other industries might look more glamorous than insurance. Some insurers, like COUNTRY, have begun to create internship and innovation labs through partnerships with universities, community colleges, and even high schools.
These programs create a talent pipeline, but also allow insurers to understand the needs and priorities of younger members of the talent pool. There’s no shortage of articles online about Millennial working styles; as Gen-Z enters the workforce, it will become even more important for insurers to gain insight into what new generations expect from their employers.
Managing student interns that are geographically separate from corporate campuses also helps IT organizations gain experience in remote collaboration. Whatever return-to-office ultimately looks like, it’s likely that more people will be working from home after COVID-19.
In July, Novarica announced the winners of the ninth annual Novarica Research Council Impact Awards. These awards recognize insurance technology projects that demonstrate real business impact and are selected by insurer CIO members of Novarica’s research council.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll continue taking an in-depth look at each of the eight winning case studies. Case studies for all winners and 20 other IT projects considered for the Impact Awards appear in this year’s Insurance Technology Case Study Compendium. More than 100 case studies from the last five years are available in Novarica’s research library.
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