If you're trying to fill underwriting assistant roles, you already know the market feels tight. The wider picture explains why. The UK labour market is currently described as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment but only slight increases in redundancies, and vacancies have dropped below pre-pandemic levels the Low Pay Commission's 2025 report. That means fewer people are moving jobs, so the ready-made, fully-trained underwriting assistant you're hoping to poach is harder to find and slower to reach.
There's a bright spot, though. Professional, scientific and technical activities, the broad category insurance sits within, saw the largest volume increase in vacancies of any sector, rising by 5,000 in the August to October 2025 period according to ONS vacancy data. Demand is real. The challenge is supply, and that's exactly why growing your own talent is worth a serious look.
The squeeze at the junior end isn't unique to insurance, and the data across adjacent sectors shows a clear pattern. Adzuna has recorded a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT's launch, with graduates facing the toughest job market since 2018 techUK reports. When employers pull back on entry-level roles, the pipeline of people who could become tomorrow's senior underwriters simply thins out.
The gap widens further up the ladder too. A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK shows that in engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK's entry-level hiring snapshot. Insurance faces the same dynamic: firms compete hard for experienced people while starving the junior pipeline that feeds them. If everyone waits for someone else to train the next generation, the shortage only gets worse.
There's a proven alternative gaining ground. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 DSIT's AI Labour Market Survey shows. Employers in fast-moving, skills-short fields are increasingly choosing to build rather than buy, and underwriting is a natural fit for the same approach.
Growing your own starts with a shift in mindset: hire for aptitude, then teach the technical craft. Underwriting rewards people who are numerate, curious and careful with detail, and those traits show up in plenty of backgrounds outside insurance. Here's a practical way to build that pipeline.
The strategy also future-proofs your team. Digital and engineering occupations appear most commonly among priority skills, many already experiencing high recruitment demand and expected to keep growing strongly Skills England's 2026 report notes. Underwriting is becoming more data-led, so hiring curious learners who can grow with the tools beats hiring for a static skill set that dates quickly.
Growing your own talent still starts with finding the right first hire, and that's where we come in. We search a database of 15 million people to surface those with the aptitude and drive to become excellent underwriting assistants, then rank a shortlist and handle the process end to end so you can focus on training rather than sifting CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. If you're ready to build a pipeline instead of chasing scarce experience, let's find your next underwriting assistant today.
