Selling a career A recruiter is waking prime graduates to the many opportunities of working in insurance By Miranda Maxwell
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n the 1967 movie The Graduate, young Benjamin Braddock was famously given short and blunt career advice: “I just want to say one word to you... Plastics.” Like plastics, insurance has notoriously suffered an image problem among the crème de la crème of young university and college graduates, overshadowed by the lure of newer and faster-moving industries and hurt by a perception of a staid, risk-averse culture. Specialist recruiter Fuse is disabusing graduates of this notion with its award-nominated Future Insure Graduate Program, showing Australia’s young high achievers that insurance can in fact be a rewarding, secure and varied career choice suited to a wide range of skills and qualifications. With the help of brokers and other industry partners who commit to taking a minimum of one graduate every year from the tailored program, Fuse is supporting the long-term development of the industry through a pipeline of new talent and future leaders, addressing under-representation of graduate talent in insurance. “These are people that are going to be the future leaders of industry and we need to attract a lot more of the graduate talent that is available,” Fuse Manager Insurance & Wealth Management Cameron Watson told Insurance News. “I don’t think as an industry we’ve done a good enough job to create the right profile around insurance. “We tend to come up against the sexy brands of PWC and Deloitte, banks – all of those big brands that attract the large majority of graduate talent. Insurance is generally a candidate-short market and it’s a real skill shortage,” Mr Watson says. Fuse has already placed more than 50 graduate candidates since the program’s Melbourne launch in 2018, and is now expanding the program into Sydney and Brisbane, with the prospect of placing
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February/March 2021
