With the insurance industry employee base rapidly aging and retiring, a number of companies and organizations in the field have come up with something that they hope will draw more young adults into the sector.

Their solution: MyPath, an online platform designed to help students and other young adults explore their career options within insurance and risk management. The Institutes, a Pennsylvania-based risk management and property/casualty insurance education organization, is funding its initial rollout.

The Institutes operates with a number of affiliates including The CPCU Society, The Insurance Research Council and CEU.com, and its board of trustees includes a number of U.S. P/C insurance executives. Its initial partners in the MyPath project include Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Munich Re, LIMRA, USAA, Chubb and Gen Re, among many other insurance companies and independent agencies, a spokesperson told Carrier Management via email. Other educational organizations including InVest and Career Connections are also taking part in the effort.

In announcing the launch during a media conference call, The Institutes President and CEO Peter Miller explained that the industry has become increasingly concerned about attracting younger professionals, particularly folks from the Millennial generation (ages 18-24). According to statistics supplied with the MyPath rollout, almost half of insurance industry professionals are over age 45, with 25 percent of the industry expected to retire by 2018. What’s more, there will be 400,000 open positions by 2020.

“A large number of [insurance industry] people are likely to retire in the next 10 years. Estimates vary, but it is in the several hundreds of thousands of people,” Miller said during the conference call. “Millennials, who will be the future of this industry, really don’t know much about insurance, and that is really the problem we are trying to solve, so they will consider insurance as a career option.”

The MyPath web portal (www.insuremypath.org) is intended to be a solution to get the word out about insurance and risk management and the options that folks can pursue to find the jobs that they want in the broader field, Miller said.

“When you ask about insurance, what you find out is [Millennials] don’t know anything, or what they think they know is incomplete or inaccurate,” Miller said. But, he added, young adults want a job to have stability, flexibility, upward mobility and the ability to make a difference. He asserted that the insurance industry has all of that, and it only needs to show interested parties how to access those opportunities.

“The good thing for the insurance industry is those characteristics that Millennials want in a career map well in our industry,” Miller said. “We think that there is a great story to tell, and an industrywide effort is necessary to do that. That is what MyPath is about.”

The fall launch of MyPath is considered a pilot project “because we know it takes a long time to establish a brand,” Miller said. “As we find out more about what Millennials want and how it matches to the industry, we will continue to add different assets to the site.”

MyPath’s organizers also plan to coordinate with the thousands of insurance and risk management organizations, initially in property/casualty but eventually in the life and health insurance spaces as well. Miller added that MyPath is taking an “aggregation approach” linking uses to career information, including internships, classes or other opportunities, provided by other organizations. “We’re not trying to replace or do something that niches have done but to direct people to those niche efforts,” Miller explained.

Organizers said the initial advertising push for MyPath’s rollout will include print and online efforts. Plans call for launching a national advertising campaign in the coming month specifically geared toward Millennials, targeting Pandora and other online radio channels, paid search, rich media, Facebook and other social media advertising, and mobile devices, according to The Institutes.