Filling the UK insurance pricing talent gap - What’s holding firms back?
The UK insurance market faces an acute talent crunch - especially in pricing roles. A recent survey (CII 2024 Insurance Talent Report) revealed that around 72% of insurers are struggling to find candidates with the right tech and data skills, while nearly 60% worry about employees being poached by other sectors
An ageing workforce amplifies this: in the London Market, more than half of employees are over 40, and 26% of the wider UK insurance workforce is over 50. When these experienced pricing professionals decide to move on as their career aspirations shift, expertise and knowledge will walk out the door.
The insurance pricing skills gap.
Insurance pricing is no longer just spreadsheet work. Today, teams need:
Advanced technical knowledge — tools like GLMs, Python, SQL and Radar analytics are table stakes in modern pricing
Commercial acumen — the ability to link pricing models to business strategy, product design and customer outcomes.
Soft skills — communication, collaboration and commercial awareness are needed for cross-functional impact.
Yet, these blended capabilities are rare in traditional hiring pools. Many hires lack sufficient hands‑on tech or commercial exposure.
Uptake of graduate programmes and new hiring solutions.
Graduate programmes in insurance now commonly span 24 months and see completion rates over 80%, but relatively few businesses offer tech or data science streams.
In 2024, 6% of UK employers said they had at least one vacancy they couldn’t fill because no candidate had the right mix of skills and experience, equating to roughly 250,000 positions in total. Pricing and other specialist insurance roles, essential but not necessarily glamorous roles, often remain unfilled for even longer unless insurers actively source talent and invest in targeted training.
The Real Costs: Speed, Retention, Opportunity.
Time-to-hire creates knock-on impacts: pricing roles often stay empty for months, delaying key initiatives and putting selling margins at risk. Once filled, attrition is fast‑paced: many firms lose as much as 32% of pricing and data staff over just two years. That turnover hits productivity, team morale and long-term capability investment.
The biggest challenges.
It often comes down to four interrelated issues:
Skills: Not enough candidates with both technical pricing tools and business insight.
Speed: Standard recruitment processes, from sourcing to offer, can often take in excess of 3 -4 months to fill.
Retention: Once hired, strong talent is vulnerable to offers from fintechs, analytics firms or adjacent sectors.
Diversity & inclusion: Traditional pipelines often under‑serve women, career returners, ex‑services talent and STEM grads from non‑mainstream backgrounds.
Solutions to close the gap.
There are emerging models reshaping how pricing talent is secured:
Recruit‑Train‑Deploy pipelines: bringing in STEM grads, ex‑forces personnel or career returners; intensive 10‑week upskilling in pricing tools; and deployment into insurer teams on contract-ready terms. This model targets the full blend of technical, commercial, and interpersonal readiness.
Inclusive sourcing: tapping into underutilised talent pools - for example, ex-forces veterans bring structured thinking; career returners bring diverse perspectives and resilience as they transition mid-career.
Employer storytelling: insurers can win against fintechs and banks by promoting the strategic importance, social impact and innovation opportunity within pricing — elevating their EVP beyond back-office stereotypes
Speedy, modular training: avoid lengthy onboarding. Build training programmes around the exact tools insurers use so hires hit the ground running.
A perfect storm.
Insurers are battling a perfect storm: an ageing workforce, rising salary competition, a fast-shifting technical landscape and slow, narrow recruitment channels. Among these challenges, the skills gap, specifically the shortage of data‑enabled insurance pricing talent blended with commercial acumen, is the most pressing. But speed of hire, retention, and diversity are tightly interlocked and must also be addressed for long‑term success.
Interested in solving this problem for your insurance pricing team?
At FlarePeople, we specialise in tackling the full talent equation head-on. Through our Pathfinders™ Academy, we source high‑potential STEM grads, ex‑services and career returners, train them rigorously in GLMs, Radar, Python, commercial pricing strategy and soft skills — then deploy them into insurer teams where they can contribute from day one.
We’d love to discuss how a tailored recruit‑train‑deploy approach can fill your insurance pricing vacancies faster, reduce attrition risk and build future‑ready capability.
Contact us for a discovery conversation, and let’s turn pricing talent into a competitive edge.
01892 553380 | info@FlarePeople.com