When you imagine what your first job out of college will be, what comes to mind? Even if it’s not what you pictured, selling insurance could be the career for you!
The months following graduation are some of the most exciting of your life, and the perfect opportunity to explore your employment options. Maybe you’re unsure of what company you’d like to work for, or even more broadly, in which industry you’d like to start your career. We’re here to tell you there are many reasons to consider becoming an insurance agent!
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Valuable Skills
Any college major, especially those with business, marketing, finance, or similar concentrations, will prepare you with transferrable skills that are beneficial for insurance sales. Such skills include understanding basic marketing principles and trends, being financially literate, as well as customer-service minded, and generally being business-oriented. Really, anyone who is motivated, responsible, and charismatic can become an agent. So, if you consider yourself to be sociable, entrepreneurial, and with a desire to have a positive impact on your community — this could be the career for you!
Any college major will prepare you with transferrable skills that are beneficial for insurance sales.
The Appeal of Independence
Perhaps you’ve always found the idea of owning your own business and operating on your own schedule to be appealing, but you aren’t quite ready to take a big risk right after graduation. While there are many social media posts touting companies that promise you the ability to work on your own terms, these often don’t have a proven business model to back those claims.
Selling insurance products as a licensed agent can provide you with all the perks of being an entrepreneur, but with products that have years of demonstrated revenue growth and stability! Best of all, you can rest assured you’ll have the backing of large, credible companies, such as field marketing organizations and insurance carriers, to help you the entire way.
Looking Forward
Careers as an insurance agent are growing, on average, faster than careers in most other industries. Employment in this sector is expected to grow five percent through 2029. The median annual income for insurance agents is $50,940, with the highest earners making upwards of $125,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. While agents can be “captive” to an individual carrier, independent insurance agents who sell products for a multitude of companies have a truly unlimited earning potential, with no pre-determined salary or commissions limitations!
The median annual income for insurance agents is $50,940, with the highest earners making upwards of $125,000!
Growing Industry, Growing Demand
IBISWorld reports that insurance is one of the biggest industries by revenue in the United States, with health and medical insurance being the second largest, and multiple other branches of insurance (i.e., life insurance and annuities, and property and casualty, and direct insurance) ranking within the top ten! As an independent agent, you can sell any type of insurance you wish — only you decide how high you’d like your ceiling to be! Another way to look at this is: everyone has multiple insurance needs, which means there’s a huge amount of sales opportunities near you!
One type of insurance that’s expected to see a lot of growth (sales potential) is health insurance, especially in the senior market. Medicare enrollments are expected to continue increasing, with the entirety of the Baby Boomer generation turning 65 by 2030. This means that approximately 73 million Americans should have an agent to make sure they’re receiving the best Medicare coverage they’re entitled to!
While the federal government offers the standard Original Medicare coverage for seniors, which covers hospital (Part A) and medical (Part B) costs, many insurance carriers offer Medicare Advantage (Part C), private alternatives to Original Medicare that often offer additional coverage, including prescription drug, vision, hearing, and dental benefits. Analysts expect more than 50 percent of all Medicare recipients to be enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans by 2030! The market is growing rapidly, and the need for insurance agents to sell these products will undoubtedly grow the same.
Getting Licensed Is Pretty Straightforward
Breathe easy! It’s a lot simpler, and much less time-consuming to become licensed and able to sell insurance than it was to earn your college degree!
Licensing, certification, and continuing education requirements for insurance agents vary from state to state, but there’s always at least one training and a test. Each type of insurance you sell (e.g., property and casualty, life, or health insurance) may have different tests or prerequisite course requirements. Some types of insurances can be sold after passing one exam that would encompass multiple kinds of insurance in one swoop (e.g., sometimes life and health), depending on the state. Upon the completion and passing of your exam(s) and any other requirements, you will simply need to pass a background check (the depths and requirements of which can vary by state), pay any applicable fees, and then you’ll be a licensed agent!
It’s a lot simpler, and much less time-consuming to become licensed and able to sell insurance than it was to earn your college degree.
Did you know that you don’t have to just sell in the state where you live? With the increased usage of internet marketing and remote sales tools, it’s easier than ever to operate as a well-rounded insurance agent with clients in a range of states or territories throughout the U.S.
Get Free Training & Support from Ritter Insurance Marketing
If you’ve decided you’re ready to become an insurance agent, Ritter Insurance Marketing can guide you through getting licensed, creating a sales portfolio of health and life insurance products, tracking your clients, and commissions, all the way through making a retirement plan!
As a field marketing organization, we offer independent insurance agents competitive contracts with national and regional insurance carriers. At no cost to you, we’ll give you the connections, training, and tools you need to write more business and earn more commissions — support you wouldn’t necessarily get if you were captive to an insurance company or completely on your own without any FMO support!
Ritter can guide you through getting licensed, creating a sales portfolio of health and life insurance products, tracking your clients, and commissions, all the way through making a retirement plan!
At Ritter, we have industry-leading, state-of-the-art enrollment, organizational, and CRM-focused tech, aimed at making our agents more efficient, more knowledgeable, and ultimately — more profitable.
We’ve created such tools as Shop & Enroll, a free client-enrollment website which we can personalize with your name, your phone number, your logo, and a unique URL. This site works in tandem with our proprietary Ritter Platform, which is a crisp agent-focused dashboard that can house all information regarding your clients, enrollments, contracts, commissions, upcoming training events and appointments, and so much more!
The Ritter Platform also offers our drug cost estimator and Medicare Quote Engine, where agents can easily compare their clients’ offerings and their differing price points to make sure they’re getting the exact coverage they need and desire for an affordable rate. These modern amenities we offer have helped usher in a new era of agent-client relationships, removing the guesswork and time-consumption that used to accompany insurance enrollments!
Uniquely, we create our own technology and tools through our in-house development team based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This way, we can easily and consistently update our technology based on our agents’ feedback, to ensure the best streamlined enrollment and retention process.
Once you get your degree and decide you’re ready to learn more about beginning your professional career as an independent insurance agent, reach out to us. We would be thrilled to help get you started!
Ready to begin your journey as an agent? Start with our completely free Step-By-Step Guide to Getting Started in Insurance Sales
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