Canada’s insurance sector faces a looming talent crisis, but universities have done little to address it beyond actuarial science. That’s the concern raised by Dr. Edward Furman (pictured), professor at York University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, where he leads the Actuarial Science Program.
Actuaries represent only a small fraction of the industry’s workforce, yet they are the only group with clear academic pathways, Furman pointed out.
“Actuarial science is very well defined. You do your degree, you take the exams, you do internships, and if you’re good enough – you get a job,” he said. “But for underwriters, brokers, claims people, compliance lawyers, risk managers – there’s no comparable university-to-industry pathway after graduation.”
Many insurance professionals, he added, arrive in the industry by chance. “I asked executives, how did you end up in insurance? Almost all of them told me the same story: they couldn’t find a job in their field, a friend or a family member suggested insurance, and they started, liked it, and moved up. That tells me that the talent pipeline between universities and the insurance sector is broken,” Furman said.
York’s actuarial program, which Furman launched in 2018, has quickly grown into a recognized centre of actuarial excellence. Other Ontario schools, including Waterloo, Toronto, McMaster, and Western, also offer strong actuarial programs. But for the much larger share of the industry workforce, Canada offers no equivalent.
“In Ontario we have zero bachelor's honours programs in risk management and insurance (except for Wilfred Lourier that offers a concentration in insurance and risk management that has a limited number of courses)," Furman said. "In the US, it’s normal for a number of top business schools to offer both actuarial science and risk management and insurance as separate bachelor's honours degrees. In Canada, we don’t have that option at all.”
The result, he said, is a talent funnel that relies heavily on college programs aligned with the Insurance Institute of Canada (IIC). Schools like Seneca or Humber offer structured routes to CIP and FCIP designations, but Furman argued this leaves the country lagging behind its peers.
Colleges “do a really good job,” he acknowledged, but the level is different from a full business or mathematics degree. “We preserve the same status quo: people graduate in something else, stumble into insurance, then go back and do professional exams towards for example ACIP/FCIP or CRM on their own,” he said.
Furman, who is also founding director of the Risk and Insurance Studies Centre (RISC) Foundation, believes the gap is especially urgent given the rise of systemic risks.
“Climate, cyber, operational – these are systemic. They are interdependent and often create chain reactions,” he said. “The old actuarial assumption of independent and identically distributed risks doesn’t work anymore. Human intuition doesn’t work anymore either. We are not good at estimating the probability of tail events, especially when they’re connected.”
That reality, he argued, demands a new generation of insurance professionals trained to understand probability, statistics, and interconnected risks – not just actuaries, but underwriters, brokers, and claims specialists too.
Asked which models Canada should look to, Furman singled out the US, and in particular the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I really like the way Wisconsin does it,” he said. “They have actuarial science, but alongside it they have risk management and insurance as a bachelor’s degree. The first year is a common core – everyone studies the basics of probability, calculus, the language of risk. Then you branch into actuarial or into broader insurance.”
That structure, he argued, ensures not only technical competence but also shared language across the industry.
“Insurance is about risk transfer. To understand risk, you need to understand probability. And if you want to understand probability, you need calculus and some linear algebra,” Furman said.
“It’s not just knowledge, it’s the ability to talk to each other. Actuaries speak a very specific language – if you’ve ever spoken to one, you know that. If underwriters and brokers don’t share that foundation, they can’t fully communicate.”
The need for that shared foundation has only grown with new perils like cyber and climate, he added. “These risks must be quantified, they must be underwritten. And that requires a common baseline of education.”
For Furman, the conclusion is clear: Canada is falling behind. “We have many actuarial science programs, more than enough for the market. But outside actuarial work, the vast majority of insurance professionals have no university-level academic pathway,” he said.
Without new undergraduate programs in risk management and insurance, he warned, the sector will continue to rely on happenstance recruitment and piecemeal training.
“Most university students don’t even think of insurance as a career, because the option isn’t there on the menu,” Furman said. “If we want the next generation ready for the new risk landscape dominated by systemic risks, we need to create that option.”
