Abstract

The Monolithic Sect

The article presents information on life insurance industry. High turnover plagues life insurance companies. Of 22,700 new full-time agents hired in the U.S. and Canada last year, 15,000 had quit by year end, the Life Insurance Agency Management Association reports. The reason for this was inadequate training. New agents got an average of less than three hours a week instruction during the first six months of employment. The life insurance companies maintain a research branch, that gathers and studies the statistics of such problems as agent failure, but they then publicly repudiate the statistics as "misleading" and even meaningless. The big problem in life insurance is "manpower development." This problem is that of attracting and training brand new agents.