Why on-the-job training falls short in insurance pricing
If you lead an insurance pricing team, you don’t need anyone to explain what a good insurance pricing analyst does. You live it every day.
What you actually need is a way to get more pricing analysts productive, safely, without breaking your seniors. And that’s where the usual promise of “we’ll train them on the job” has quietly stopped working.
This isn’t about not knowing what to train. It’s about not having the time, headspace or structure to do it properly – while still hitting loss ratio, growth and governance expectations.
In this article we’ll look at:
Why on-the-job training has stopped working as a primary strategy for insurance pricing analysts
The real (often hidden) cost to your team and delivery
Why a pricing-specific Recruit–Train–Deploy (RTD) model – with ready-trained analysts deployed into your team – is becoming the logical answer
The impossible equation you’re being asked to solve
Most pricing leaders are trying to do all of this at once:
Hit plan on loss ratio and growth
Keep BAU, MI and governance in good shape
Deliver change (new products, new markets, rating engines, models)
Cover for vacancies and attrition
“Grow your own” junior insurance pricing analysts
All with:
A limited number of true “unblockers”
Constant interruptions and firefighting
A hiring market where experienced pricing talent is hard to find
When someone says: “Let’s just hire a smart person and train them on the job.”
…what you’re really hearing is: “Can you and your senior analysts do a second job as full-time trainers, with no extra time and no reduction in targets?”
That’s not a talent strategy. It’s a capacity problem disguised as optimism.
Why on-the-job training quietly breaks down in pricing teams
On paper, on-the-job training sounds efficient: real work, real data, real context.
But in reality, inside an insurance pricing team, it usually looks like this.
1. Senior analysts become accidental trainers (with little or no slack)
Your best people are already:
Pulling and validating data
Refreshing models and reviewing analysis
Preparing for pricing committees and governance forums
Leading or supporting transformation projects
Then you add:
Ad-hoc explanations of tools and concepts
Reviewing junior work line by line
“Shadowing” sessions squeezed between meetings
Their original workload doesn’t go away. Training is just piled on top.
The result: everything slows down, and your seniors end the week more exhausted, not more leveraged.
2. Juniors learn in fragments, not systems
Because training is squeezed into spare moments:
New pricing analysts see whatever work happens to be on the desk that day
They get depth in some areas, randomness in others
Critical topics – like governance, documentation, Consumer Duty thinking – often get the least structured time
You end up with smart people who have patchy foundations, and seniors who aren’t fully confident in what they can safely delegate.
3. BAU and change both suffer
When senior time is split three ways:
Deliver their own high-value work
Plug BAU gaps
Coach juniors live on real work
…something has to give:
Projects take longer
Committees are less prepared
Or development quietly gets deprioritised
None of those are acceptable outcomes in a regulated, high-impact function like insurance pricing.
4. You shift learning risk onto live portfolios
Everyone recognises this scenario:
Letting a new analyst touch a rating factor “for experience”
Asking them to draft analysis for a committee
Hoping any issues are caught before they hit customers or sign-off
Most of the time, it’s fine. Until it isn’t. In a Consumer Duty environment, training by trial-and-error on live portfolios is not a sustainable risk position.
The hidden economics of “we’ll train them on the job”
On-the-job training feels cost-effective because there’s no separate invoice for it. But if you look at it the way you look at pricing decisions, the real costs stack up:
Senior analyst time: Hours spent explaining, reviewing, fixing and redoing work that could have been trained in a controlled environment.
Slower delivery: Pricing changes and projects take longer because your key people are constantly context-switching into ad-hoc training.
Longer time-to-productivity: It can take 9–12 months before a new insurance pricing analyst is genuinely net-positive for the team.
Burnout and attrition risk: Precisely the people you rely on most are the ones carrying the heaviest load.
If you priced this honestly, as you would a pricing decision on a product, “train them on the job” would rarely be your preferred option.
What changes with ready-trained, deployed insurance pricing analysts
A Recruit–Train–Deploy (RTD) model flips this completely.
Instead of:
Hire > onboard > drop them into the team > hope they pick things up fast enough.
You get:
Recruit for potential and aptitude > train intensively off-your-books in insurance pricing tools, soft “power” skills, insurance context and business acumen > deploy into your team when they’re already conversant in insurance pricing.
By the time a ready-trained pricing analyst walks into your team, they already:
Understand core insurance pricing concepts and terminology
Have worked with typical pricing data structures and tools
Know the basics of documentation, governance and regulatory thinking
Have practiced structuring analysis and recommendations for stakeholdersscratch
Your team’s job becomes contextualising and integrating, not building from scratch.
Why a pricing-specific RTD model beats generic training every time
Generic graduate schemes and generic data programmes are great, but they don’t directly and effectively solve this problem for you because they:
teach tools and techniques without the realities of insurance pricing
rotate people across multiple teams and areas before they build depth in pricing
ignore governance, committees and Consumer Duty expectations
don’t prepare people for the commercial and political context of pricing teams
FlarePeople’s Pathfinders™ RTD model is built differently, and very deliberately so, around your world:
Recruit: We source and select high-potential people (graduates, ex-forces, career returners) with the numeracy, learning agility and communication to thrive as insurance pricing analysts.
Train: We put them through a 10-week Pathfinders™ Academy focused only on insurance pricing – data, models, tools, business context and governance – not generic analytics.
Deploy: We deploy them (on an initial 2into UK insurers, MGAs and insurtechs as junior insurance pricing analysts who can start contributing far faster than traditional hires.
We’re not a generic training vendor or a simple supplier of pricing talent – we’re the UK’s only Recruit–Train–Deploy pipeline built specifically for insurance pricing.
What this actually gives a head of pricing in year one
Strip away the jargon and an RTD partnership with FlarePeople gives you:
A predictable stream of junior pricing capacity: You can plan around cohorts of Pathfinders™, instead of hoping the lateral hiring market behaves when you have vacancies.
Shorter time-to-productivity for new analysts: You’re not spending six months getting someone to the starting line; they arrive with the basics embedded.
Relief for your senior team: Your best people are still coaching and challenging – but they’re building on a solid base, not teaching “what is a loss ratio?” for the tenth time.
Less key-person dependency: Capability is built into a system (academy + RTD deployment), not just into the heads of a few £go-to” analysts
A cleaner, credible story for ExCo and Board: When asked, “How are you building pricing capability over the next 3 years?”, you can talk about a repeatable RTD model, not just good intentions and ad-hoc hires.
If this is the reality in your team…
Senior analysts are stretched too thin
New hires take too long to become truly useful
Too much depends on one or two “heroes”
“We’ll train them on the job” is still the default answer, even though everyone feels the strain
…then you don’t have a knowledge problem. You have a capacity and model problem.
You already know exactly what good insurance pricing analysts do. What you need is a better way of getting more of them, ready to contribute, without breaking the people you have. That’s what an insurance pricing-specific RTD pipeline model is for.
If you’d like to see what it would look like to plug Pathfinders™ into your team – how many analysts, what they can do on day one and how the commercials work – a short conversation is usually enough to see if it’s a fit.
FAQs: Training Insurance Pricing Analysts
Q: Why isn’t on-the-job training enough for insurance pricing analysts?
A: Because the role spans analytics, regulation and commercial decision-making, relying mainly on on-the-job training puts too much pressure on senior analysts, slows delivery and pushes risky learning onto live portfolios. It’s a capacity issue, not a knowledge issue.
Q: What is a Recruit–Train–Deploy (RTD) model in insurance pricing?
A: An RTD model means a specialist partner recruits high-potential people, trains them intensively in insurance pricing, then deploys them into pricing teams as ready-trained analysts. It reduces time to productivity and takes the heavy lifting of training off your internal team.
Q: How does RTD help pricing leaders with limited team capacity?
A: RTD allows your senior analysts to focus on high-value work and targeted coaching, instead of teaching fundamentals from scratch. Ready-trained insurance pricing analysts arrive with core skills and context, so your team can plug them into live work much faster.
Q: Why is FlarePeople different from generic training providers?
A: FlarePeople focuses solely on insurance pricing in the UK and runs a full Recruit–Train–Deploy model. We don’t just sell courses; we deliver cohorts of Pathfinders™ who have been selected, trained and assessed specifically for pricing, and then deploy them into your team as usable capacity.