The pitch behind the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance’s (ANZIIF) new Business School starts with a blunt workforce warning: the skills insurance professionals rely on today will not be the same skills they need by the end of the decade. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of key skills required in the job market to change by 2030, as technology, economic pressures, demographic shifts and the green transition reshape work. The same report points to a growing premium on analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility.
That backdrop helps explain why ANZIIF is moving beyond a conventional conference format and into something more targeted for insurance professionals who already know the sector and now need to keep up with where it is heading. The institute’s inaugural Business School, to be held in Sydney on 18 June 2026, is being pitched as a university-style, in-person learning experience built around four expert-led sessions covering the future direction of insurance in Australia, regulatory operations, cyber and AI, and the growing impact of natural catastrophes. Attendees can register for one session or all four.
For brokers in particular, the concept is aimed squarely at the growing pressure to interpret complexity rather than simply absorb information. Regulatory expectations are rising, cyber products are evolving, climate and catastrophe pressures are redrawing risk, and clients increasingly expect sharper advice delivered with commercial fluency. Against that backdrop, Katrina Shanks (pictured at the recent Steadfast Convention on the Gold Coast, Australia), ANZIIF’s CEO, is making the case for a more deliberate form of mid-career learning.
Read next: Future skills are the foundation of trust
“That means that you're going to need different critical thinking skills, it means you're going to need to analyse big data, it means you're going to have to learn and relearn and unlearn and relearn technology, because your technology is going to change,” she said.
Shanks said the Business School has been designed in response to a clear gap in the market: Experienced insurance professionals want more advanced learning, and they want more of it in person.
“We're hearing that there is a need in the market for more face-to-face interaction and more face-to-face learning,” she said.
There’s also a growing demand for more specialised and advanced learning.
“There’s a lot of foundation education out there and foundation learning, but not so much for those that have been in the sector for 10 years plus,” said Shanks.
The training model hopes to cater for senior brokers, underwriters, claims leaders and other established practitioners who need sharper access to ideas, specialist insight and practical discussion about where the market is moving next.
The format reflects that. The event is structured as a flexible drop-in learning day. ANZIIF says the program will run across four sessions and offer up to 6 CIP points, with participants able to attend a single session or curate their own day. A marketplace of sponsors and exhibitors will sit around the event, but the core proposition is disciplined, expert-led learning rather than conference theatre.
The sharper strategic point is that ANZIIF is not just offering another event. It is testing a different delivery model for an industry that is being asked to adapt faster, think broader and work across more fluid lines of risk.
“This business school is the beginning of how we're going to think differently, how we're going to learn differently, not the traditional methods that we've delivered in the past,” said Shanks.
The Business School - taking place at UTS in Sydney on June 18 - looks less like a one-off experiment and more like a signal about how professional education in insurance may need to evolve. The WEF research suggests employers are already grappling with large-scale skills disruption and see upskilling as a central response. For the insurance industry, that challenge is especially acute because the job itself is changing: brokers are being pushed deeper into advisory work, technology is reworking workflows and emerging risks require more cross-disciplinary judgment.
Shanks argues that this means creating learning environments that are rigorous enough for experienced professionals and flexible enough for time-poor ones. Her broader point is that as the sector changes, its learning model has to change with it.
