The general insurance industry has been consistently growing in India. In the financial year 2017-2018 the industry clocked a gross written premium of Rs. 133,348.33 Crore (Rs. 133,348,3.3 Mn) growing at 17 percent over the previous financial year. The industry is seeing an accelerating evolution in the way business is conducted and being driven by innovation and higher customer expectations.

Talent development in a knowledge-intensive industry like general insurance is therefore vital and an important strategic differentiator. My organization follows a two-pronged integrated talent philosophy: vertical alignment through our organization’s strategy and talent development process, and horizontal alignment through building capabilities to implement the business strategy.

The vision workshop is the starting point where senior leadership ideates, challenges assumptions, and debates organizational issues in the changing landscape to define and develop the direction for coming years. These are further broken down into milestones. The talent development team has designed a platform that helps in effective communication and engagement of the strategic imperatives to the entire organization. The same platform is used to get views from the larger organization to fine-tune the strategy around business and culture that helps reduce execution bottlenecks. Clearly the purpose of the talent development team is to define and drive the change agenda and build capability across levels.

One of the important philosophies of learning and development within the organization is “leaders as teachers.” The entire senior management participates in the pre-designed learning events and town halls as facilitators or speakers. The organization has a Learning Council where subject matter experts engage in instructor-led sessions or design domain content and contribute items to the question bank for assessments. These contributions are voluntary and tracked within the system. The top contributors in terms of either number of hours trained or domain content contributed get an opportunity to spend time with senior management to share their experiences. This also acts as a platform to develop a point of view—an important trait in the managerial and leadership journey.

The company follows a certification-based approach to develop and assess talent within the organization. These internal certifications are broadly categorized into domain and people certifications. The domain certifications have three levels with increasing difficulty.

We also have a learning architecture (internally branded as Leader Ladder) that supports stakeholders across levels in their capability building. Onboarding programs for new hires require a skip-level manager to have five meetings with the new employee in the first three months. The objective of these engagements is to make the new hire job-ready and culturally align them to the organization.

The domain learning is a continuous process through certification architecture; Learning Council members get recognition for the number of training hours, content creation, and assessments they complete. For example, a customer service team will have a broadly defined capability building architecture in line with the organizational objective, a series of planned programs that are delivered by subject matter experts, and pre- and post-program evaluations. Similarly, such programs are designed for all other verticals, functions, and departments.

Certification takes care of managerial and leadership capability building. As an organization, we believe there are three important transitions professionals go through. The first is when a person moves from being an individual contributor to first-time manager. The second is when they move to become a manager of managers, and the third is the transition from being a manager to emerging leader. The talent development team has put in a robust program to support individuals during these transitions and build capability to be successful in these roles.

At a leadership development level, we have designed an elaborate multiyear leader development road map with milestones. Leveraging external expertise, we identified the gaps through psychometric assessments and one-on-one interviews. Based on these assessments, tailored individual and group theme leadership programs are designed to build the existing leadership strength and leadership pipeline.

One of the underlying philosophies followed for capability building is the 70-20-10 principle. All the programs are designed with this philosophy, where 10 percent of learning happens through education (e-learning, pre-reads, videos, classroom); 20 percent through exposure (social learning, huddles, coaching); and 70 percent through experience (application in the actual work environment).

Technology acts as an important enabler to disseminate knowledge across the organization. Webinars are used for quick product and process updates. Since the organization is on Office 365, Yammer is extensively used for collaborative learning and as a knowledge management platform. Technology enables anytime, anywhere, and any-device learning that allows participants to learn at their own pace and convenience. An internally developed quiz app allows employees to compete in their cohorts on assessments through a dashboard in a fun-filled manner to facilitate bite-sized learning.

Overall, with some deep-rooted philosophies, our talent development team is able to leverage the resources and enablers on our staff, and is well poised to meet our present and future talent development requirements.