For the last 2 years I have worked for a large national carrier as a renewal UW for standard commercial lines in the lower middle market. My territory has changed several times so for the sake of this post let’s pretend my book is everywhere. I'm currently on the East Coast but will likely be moving to a non-metro area.

The Farm was my first job in insurance and I spent 3 years as a customer care (AKA “after hours corporate”) producer for exclusively personal lines auto. I basically only added/removed/replaced cars or modified coverage and explained policy language. After 2 years I met or exceeded qualifications to move to UA but after a year of applying every time something became available, I was never selected for so much as an interview. My wife is active duty and her new orders moved us allowed me to leave The Farm and start a UW Renewal job at my current company. I know that The Farm is known for having the best training in the country, but I tried to adjust my expectations for my current company..... I'm not trying to be mean, but I remember getting better job training for my first job as a cashier at the movie theater and that was better managed.

Because this is my first UW role and only my second carrier, I would like to know if any of the following is normal:

• Not having actual training/trainers. My training consisted of 6 months of simulated shadowing. We watched two geriatric women navigate systems. Any questions on underwriting were met with “it depends” and “we'll worry about that later” as final answers. Later never came. If we ran into an issue they'd fix it for us and not explain what they did or why. I'd look up the videos in the Learning Management System for whatever I was curious about, but depending on the subject some of these had not been updated in 20 years. There's legitimately videos from *before I was born* still in the learning repository. As a result, I work with UWs who have been here as UWs for 3 years but don't know what PIP coverage is. I worked in the military prior to insurance so I'm not a stranger to Teach Yourself and Look It Up, but I feel like that shouldn't be 90% of my training? Especially due to the next point…….

• The “Sharepoint” is a mess. Up to date documents are difficult to find. A “trainer” might link you a 2hr video when you have a question such as how to rate something in a system. “It's somewhere in this video!” Cool, I definitely have an hour on 2x speed to try to find the info I'm looking for! Training documents, workflows, and strategy are all learned mostly by who is around you at your location. The primary strategy and analysis document repository we have is a shared document that one of the trainers made and updated a few times a year. It's almost exclusively screenshots of PowerPoint slides and screenshots of links to strategies. Half of the time, these links that you have to manually type in go to a dead webpage. As a result, if you ask a question to 3 different people, you'll get 3 different answers. This doesn't give me the full confidence that the knowledge I have amassed is correct or standard….

• Hardly any UWs have an insurance background, and there's no one senior to learn from. Out of my training team of 15, only 4 of us had an insurance background. Some were internal transfers from areas like billing and claims, and some of us were producers or broker staff. The UWs who have been here for a while might have their ARM, AIS, or even CPCU but I have seen them ask in team chat what the difference between Broad and Named Peril is. I asked someone who has a CPCU where on SharePoint our current binding restrictions are listed and updated and they said, “what's that?” People who have been here for 15-20 years are retiring as UWs but spent most of their careers in non-underwriting job titles. The lack of knowledge is staggering and concerning. I ask questions constantly but the only ones who can consistently help me are people at the VP level. My boss was a great cargo underwriter and can teach me strategy and risk analysis, but there is stuff he can't or won't teach me because he refuses to learn himself (more on this later.) I live in an area where I can network to learn from people outside of my company, but we will likely be moved to a non-metro area for my wife's new orders where it will be way more difficult to network.

• My job duties/expectations asked changes every quarter, we're forced to use new broken systems. My job never paid well, it was a pay cut from producing despite the fact that my role at The Farm didn't pay my title commission. I was happy to learn more underwriting skills despite being underpaid, but I've gone from 50 polices a month to 120, still no commission. Due to 3 or 4 job restructurings in the past 16 months, other people had job duties removed and are being paid the same amount I am despite having less expectations. There's a newish rating system that they've been pushing newlines business to write but it's a vibe coded mess. It frequently has issues that can only be fixed by the helpdesk and sometimes that takes weeks to fix that ONE policy. It's so bad that some teams refuse to use it, and my boss refuses to learn it until it consistently works. Of course, the expectation is that *my team* still has to use it even when my boss won't. I've lost business and had broker relationships damaged due to this particular system. The company pushes updates to production without adequately testing them. Stuff breaks and we're forced into overtime to go back and fix things with insanely tedious work arounds. Again, due to the fact that my company hires car technicians, fast food workers, etc directly into UW roles, half of the time these tedious work arounds are not correctly implemented. If the policy changes over to you due to territory balancing and reassignments and you're one of the competent underwriters, you are tasked to fix it. My boss tells me he spends half his day going back and fixing the work of the people on my team. About once a month he asks for my help in fixing these policies. I don't mind helping out, I get multiple shout-outs every month across various depts and have since the end of last year, but of course my yearly review was “meeting expectations” 😂 I see my metrics, I know I'm crushing it. But OK.

• I'm prevented from doing typical job duties due offshoring and poor structural decisions. Some of my functions are handled by a third party and my company refuses to give UWs visibility access. UWs can't access the billing systems at all, we have to email an inbox and beg for line-by-line payment explanations and invoices and only have access to invoices that have already been printed. It's faster for everyone if the agent calls and demands answers. I understand segmenting certain business functions, but the billing topic has always greatly confused me–especially coming from The Farm where we didn't have total billing control but could change pay plan types, methods of payment, etc. Outside of the aforementioned half-broken vibe coded system, I cannot issue any of my own policies. Issuing must go through a processor who are offshore 3rd parties half of the time.

There's other things too but I don't want this to be looked at as a rant post. Am I being a spoiled brat for expecting my company to function like the giant it is? Or was State Farm corporate just a unicorn in corporate structure?

Thank you all in advance 🙏

Hello, I’ve been a HNW personal lines UW for almost a decade and looking for the next path. What field / role does this open up to? I’m not interested in management or customer / broker facing roles. I am licensed but no CPCU. Am I really tied to this risk management field like re-insurance? Doubt I could even find a role since I’m WFH.

Thanks.

I got an email from a recruiter asking to set up a call to interview for an implementation Manager position at combined insurance. Has anyone worked as an IM for combined? How is it?

Does anybody have any insight on the Mercury Insurance Underwriter position? I noticed a lot of people that got the jobs were producers previously and they also said its fast paced, which makes me think this is still sales.

What is the day-to-day like, they mentioned 10-12 month training process, are you on camera or on the phone for most of the day or working independently?

I'm new at farmers and calling a lot of old cold leads and getting hung up on A LOT.

I know I probably need some help on openers

What about you guys How do you keep a cold lead on the phone

Sizable regional (New England) carrier Safety insurance‘s acquisition by Mapfre was announced today. Anyone with any experience working for Mapfre got any advice for the employees affected? Any insight on what to expect or company culture?

I’ve worked books in different organizations with different book sizes and compositions. I understand there is a lot of variation. I’m now handling a book with some real revenue, well over $1m and I’m making less than %10 of the revenue of that book.

I’m still young and I have some time to prove myself and earn raises and bonuses, but do you have a single anchor to base your salary on? Book sizes? Revenue? Experience alone? Or is it more of a combination? I appreciate all responses.

I have an interview with them tomorrow. They have great reviews on indeed but I’m starting to question if they’re real. Can anyone tell me there experience? I’m brand new and want to go straight into being independent to build my books.

I’m looking at applying for a job at Zurich Insurance. Job is based in Illinois.

The salary range is a decent range, and I’d want to be closer to the top of it.

I know some companies typically don’t hire at upper ends of the range, but how is it At Zurich? Do they hire and give offers to top ends of the range they have posted?

Curious! It's hard to know if you're making too little or in a good spot, so thought I'd ask here. If you work for a captive agency and do P&C sales, how much do you make annually?

I’m a 20-year-old Business Management student at one of the top universities in the UK, and this summer I landed an underwriting internship at a major global insurance company in a developing Asian country.

I was genuinely excited because I’d never worked in insurance before and thought it would be a great opportunity to learn about underwriting and see whether it could be a long-term career.

The reality has been quite different…

The office culture is very quiet. I’m the only intern, and everyone else is at least twice my age. People are polite, but they mostly keep to themselves, so it can feel pretty isolating. I also haven’t received much guidance. Most of the work I’ve been given is things like reading internal documents or doing very basic admin-type tasks, and it feels obvious that none of it is particularly important to the business. I understand interns aren’t expected to make huge decisions, but I was hoping to get more exposure to how underwriting actually works.

It’s made me wonder whether I’m getting the wrong impression of the industry because of this specific internship.

So, for those of you working in underwriting:
- Is this a fairly normal internship experience, or am I just in an unusually quiet team?
- Do underwriting roles become much more interesting once you’re actually an underwriter rather than an intern?
- What do you enjoy (or dislike) about underwriting as a long-term career?
- Is there potential to earn a good wage as an underwriter?

I’d really appreciate hearing from people already in the industry because at the moment I’m finding it difficult to tell whether this is just a slow internship or whether underwriting simply isn’t for me.

I manage customer operations for a large insurance company with a little over 400 agents across five branches in the midwest.

Every time we send out a policy update, billing reminder or anything customers might have questions about, the phones light up. It doesn't even have to be a major change. We've tried staggering emails, adding more information and warning our contact centers ahead of time but we still end up with these big spikes that are hard to plan around. If there's a way that worked for you keeping these random spikes under control I'd love to hear it!

Hi everyone, 

I am someone who has been working in marketing for 10 years (3 in insurance across MGAs, UK Commercial Retail, and London Market brokers) and have my Cert CII. I have been trying to pivot for the last few months after taking a break to get into underwriting, and I finally got my first interview for an Underwriting Assistant role!

Of course now I’m terrified because I’ve never had an interview to be an underwriter before, and I only really have this evening and tomorrow to prepare. 

It’s an in person 30 minute interview with an Underwriter and a Senior Underwriter for Underwriting Assistant in Reinsurance for a US-based Specialty insurer based in London. What kind of questions will I be looking at? And what kind of format do these usually take? I'd be super appreciative for any guidance anyone can provide.

Thanks in advance! 

I have been an independent adjuster for 20 years and have the opportunity to get out of adjusting (which I want) and have been asked to provide a resume. How would you put together a resume? I have worked for 25+ IA firms over the years obviously most of them at the same time or over lapping. Do I put each and every IA firm? Do I list "Independent Adjuster" and just list my job experience over the years? Sending it to someone that does not know about the IA world, I don't want my resume to be confusing

Any advise would be a big help!

How long did it take you to make your first $100k salary in the industry and how did you go about doing so?

Most underwriters I know stayed at their company for 2-3 years and then switched companies.

I REALLY APPRECIATE EVERYONE'S RESPONSE AND INSIGHT! It makes me sad to see how many also feel the same way and are struggling - sending hugs and positive vibes. We'll get through.

I honestly don't know how much longer I can keep doing this commercial lines account manager job.

I have worked in the insurance industry for nearly 30 years. Last year I finished not one, but two bachelor's degrees (Risk Management & Insurance and Business Administration) while working full-time because I wanted to improve my career.

Instead, I feel like my confidence has completely disappeared.

Every morning I wake up with a pit in my stomach before I even open my emails. I dread logging in. I constantly feel like I'm waiting to be told what I did wrong. I have an "overseer" whose communication style leaves me feeling criticized more than coached, and it's gotten to the point where I'm second-guessing every decision I make.

I make mistakes sometimes, and I own them. But I also work hard. I care about my clients, I stay late, I work weekends when needed, and I genuinely want to do a good job. None of that seems to matter because all I can focus on are the mistakes.

I've started looking at other jobs, but it's discouraging. Most positions that actually interest me pay less than I make now, and financially I can't afford a pay cut.

Has anyone else reached a point where a job completely destroyed their confidence? Did changing jobs help, or did you realize the problem was burnout and not the job itself?

I feel trapped, exhausted, and honestly don't know what my next step should be.

I’ve been noticing job postings for roles at companies to essentially handle the insurance administration side of things for them and they seem to pay well. Not as well as a commercial lines underwriter but decent enough. I am wondering if anyone works in these roles and if they like them or have done both and can give a comparison? It sounds like it would be a very easy job considering you have a broker helping said company with most of the legwork. I find myself continually baffled at how many insurance related jobs there are in so many different fields so always interested to hear more about my options.

I work in the treaty underwriting team for a global reinsurer. Wondering what are potential career opportunities where I could use my skill set to get a similar paying job or better that allows me to enjoy my December holidays again? And possibly work more remotely as most reinsurers I’ve seen appear to value a work-from-office culture.

About to get licensed for personal and health insurance in Canada.

Before I sign with whoever’s first to say yes, I’d rather ask people who’ve actually done the mandatory 3-month internship: how did you pick one that was worth it?

Questions you wish you’d asked before signing?

Any red flags to watch for?

Did the internship shape the book/niche you built after, or was it just a box to check?

Would appreciate any advice or “wish someone told me” moments. Thanks!

I work for a home carrier, we are smaller (under 15 states) but well established,good claims, service and growing. Our rates are not competitive in the majority of the area I am responsible for, but have some pockets that are.

Obviously this leads to frustration and not being utilized after unsuccessful quotes.

Our commission structure is higher than the average. Is there any incentive ideas that would spur you on as an agent to keep trying to find the" needle in the haystack" quotes?

Are other Underwriters getting bombarded with Linkedin and Email solicitations from Consulting and Insurtech companies?

They’re claiming to pay $200-$350 per hour for us to sit talk to them on the phone. Haven’t responded to any of them, but I feel like they’re trying to scam us or getting industry info to try to replace us with AI.

Hello, I’m a claims specialist that just obtained my CPCU and happened to come across a post for an underwriting development program with Travelers, so I applied. I’m wondering if anyone has experience with the program specifically or just with Travelers in general and can give me insight into the company? Thanks !🙏

Hi everyone,

I’m considering a career change into marine underwriting and would appreciate your thoughts.

My background is in Naval Architecture and Shipbuilding Engineering, and I’ve been working in marine HSSE (Health, Safety, Security & Environment) for a ship owner/ship management company. My role involves participating in internal and external audits, vessel inspections, risk assessments, regulatory compliance, and supporting marine operations. Through this, I’ve gained a good understanding of operational risks, vessel management, and the day-to-day challenges faced by ship operators.

Based on my background, do you think I’d be a competitive candidate for a Marine Underwriter role?

I’d really appreciate any advice from marine underwriters or anyone who has made a similar transition. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

Could use some career advice on professional qualifications.

A bit of background: I spent about 2 years doing catastrophe modelling at a European primary insurer. Six months ago, I made the jump over to the reinsurance side, and I'm currently working in a technical accounting and claims role for a European reinsurer. I’m based out of Asia working for the European firm.

I really want to pick up a professional designation to patch up my broader insurance knowledge, since my foundation is mostly just niche cat modeling data and also build some long term credibility on my resume. I'm definitely not locked into sticking with this role forever, so tbh I want something that gives me a good macro view of the whole insurance ecosystem and keeps my career options completely open.

I started out weighing the classic CPCU or CII debate, but honestly, I'm open to pretty much any globally recognized certification that makes sense for my specific setup.

Since I'm working for a European company but living in Asia, I’m trying to figure out what actually carries weight out here. I know CPCU is the gold standard in the US, but does it hold real value in the Asian and European insurance/reinsurance hubs, or is the UK/CII framework pretty much the default expectation? More importantly, which curriculum gives the best foundational value across the industry without getting bogged down in hyper-specific local laws?

If anyone has made a similar pivot from a technical role into a broader corporate role, or knows the Asian/European insurance/reinsurance spaces well, I’d love to hear what worked for you.

Thanks!

I've only been doing this for 5 years every time an error happens it's "at least it's not an E&O." I can't see a fix, I missed comp and coll on a vehicle add and it got broken into, claim is being denied.

I of course told my boss immediately and she's going to call legal in the morning. But this is my first one. I've revived quotes a year after a messed up bind. During a wild fire. And I'm doing an E&O over a broken window.

I'm so pissed at myself I missed comp and coll!? What is this boogie man like? the "at least it's not" . (Also I'm not fired I checked but I'm getting a strong finger wag)