Despite looming consolidation, health plans and insurers broadly need to attract more younger workers as Baby Boomers retire and markets evolve.
Across the health, life, property and casualty insurance industries, employees are aging at around the same pace of their U.S. customers. Almost half of the insurance workforce will hit retirement age in next decade and there will be nearly half a million job openings by 2022, including in health insurance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"The stats have insurance companies worried that millennials aren't applying for entry-level jobs because they don't know about them--or, worse, think the industry's dull," as Bloomberg Businessweek wrote recently.
And so, they're "hoping to be hip." Allstate, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, the Society of Actuaries and several dozen other insurance leaders are trying to rebrand the industry as part of recruiting, sponsoring a project called "My Path: Insurance. It's Limitless."
But, actually, it seems that quite a few high school and college students are interested in pursuing a healthcare career, broadly defined, including insurance.
Moreso than in past years, millenials have a deep interest in medicine and healthcare, from hospitals to pharmaceuticals to health insurance, according to a survey by National Society of High School Scholars.
The NSHSS surveyed 18,000 high school students, college students and recent graduates, and found that 40 percent of respondents are expecting to work in the health and medicine field. Local hospitals, HCSC, Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies and UnitedHealth Group ranked high among preferred employers.
Among the top five preferred employers are Google (predictably), Walt Disney Company, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Apple and the FBI. Beyond those, the NSHSS survey found, hospitals and health companies are among the most popular, accounting for eight employers in the top 25.
Number six on the list of preferred employers is actually many different employers categorized as one: "local hospital." The ninths most preferred is Health Care Services Corporation, the family of BCBS plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
Number 10 is Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, number 14 is Mayo Clinic, number 22 is Blue Cross and Blue Shield (again, representing more than one institution), number 23 is UnitedHealth Group and number 25 is Atlantic Health Service.
Other healthcare companies in the top NAHSS' 100 preferred employers are Johnson & Johnson (36), Boston Scientific (37), Kaiser Permanente (46), CVS Caremark (49), Meridian Health (52), Baptist Health South Florida (55), WellStar Health System (57), Southern Ohio Medical Center (62), Scripps Health (68), Ohio Health (70), Bayer (72), Genentech (76), Novartis (81), Aetna 95, The Everett Clinic (99) and Cigna at 100 (tied with Chesapeake Energy). Other health and insurance companies made the top 200 list: MetLife (104), Allianz Life Insurance (127) and Express Scripts (133).
It's possible the high-profile of healthcare and health reform has piqued the interest of America's best and brightest youth--inspiring them to help fix a troubled industry and make a healthy income in the process.
Among other young entrepreneurs, Grant Verstandig, a 26-year-old Brown University dropout, is probably a millionaire or close to it after UnitedHealth Group took a majority stake in his digital wellness startup, Audax Health Solutions. In the NSHSS survey, BCBS, rated at number 22 this year, was ranked 41 in 2014, while Aetna was previously 115 and Cigna 116.
It's also possible that a large chunk of millennials are savvy and sense an opportunity in healthcare and insurance, despite the lack of immediate glamour in the insurance industry and the 20th century-esque experience of receiving healthcare in many parts of the country.
Jonny Blount, an Eastern Kentucky University risk management student, told Bloomberg Businessweek that after his dreams of playing football dried out, he took internships at State Farm and Lloyd's, earned some money to cover tuition and then figured he could have a good career. "Insurance has just really opened doors for me."
Millennials are becoming the largest generation in the workforce and the younger among them, those still in college or graduating now, may have different views of the economy and career ambitions that those who graduated amid the shoddy job market of the Great Recession.
"The confidence they place in their plans to enter the workforce quickly in their fields may be more realistic than in previous years," wrote Susan Thurman, director of the NSHSS's scholarship program.
Millennials as a whole, though, are probably unique from their parents generation in more than a few ways, and attracting the best and brightest may require adapting with new approaches to life-work balance, like flexible telecommuting, said Christopher Swift, CEO of The Hartford.
Millennials "have a tremendous thirst for information and knowledge and want to know how things work," he said at the Property/Casualty Joint Industry Forum. "They are interested in time off and in working in urban areas with mass transit and reasonable commutes, and companies that hire them need to be aware of those things," said Swift, whose own company has a flexible work-from-home policy.
Across industries, employers plan to hire 8 percent more new college graduates this year than last, and overall hiring is expected to increase 7.5 percent for the class of 2015, according to estimates by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Employment in insurance industries increased by around 80,000 last year, with health insurers seeing the largest hiring growth--5.6 percent, or 26,700 jobs--according to the BLS.
Across the BLS' "insurance and related activities," management positions are expected to grow by 13 percent from 2012 to 2022. The BLS is also predicting that health and other insurance companies will have a large need especially for technology experts, with "computer and mathematical" positions at insurers and insurance servicers expected to increase 32 percent.