An insurance sales representative sells insurance policies. They call and meet with current and potential clients to grow their customer base. Usually, their main goal is to obtain information about clients' needs and match them with the insurance policies they offer.
To understand clients' needs, insurance sales representatives must have excellent listening skills. They must also be able to understand written documents describing insurance instruments and convey information about the products they sell.
To work as an insurance agent, it would be best to have a high school diploma or equivalent and an insurance license from the state. The licensing requirements vary between states, but they typically require that candidates take an insurance course, plus pass an exam given by the state.
Insurance sales representatives make a median salary of $50,940.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being an insurance representative. For example, did you know that they make an average of $17.43 an hour? That's $36,247 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 10% and produce 48,300 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many insurance representatives have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed analytical skills, communication skills and initiative.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be an insurance representative, we found that a lot of resumes listed 25.8% of insurance representatives included insurance companies, while 17.9% of resumes included customer service, and 6.4% of resumes included health care. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the insurance representative job title. But what industry to start with? Most insurance representatives actually find jobs in the insurance and health care industries.
If you're interested in becoming an insurance representative, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 33.6% of insurance representatives have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 5.5% of insurance representatives have master's degrees. Even though some insurance representatives have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become an insurance representative. When we researched the most common majors for an insurance representative, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or high school diploma degrees. Other degrees that we often see on insurance representative resumes include associate degree degrees or diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become an insurance representative. In fact, many insurance representative jobs require experience in a role such as customer service representative. Meanwhile, many insurance representatives also have previous career experience in roles such as cashier or sales associate.