Pinnacol Assurance isn’t the kind of company most people think about, unless they’re having one of the worst days of their lives. And the workers’ compensation industry certainly isn’t on the mind of high school students mapping out their future.
Or at least it wouldn’t be if not for Julie Wilmes and the company’s apprenticeship team. Their job is to make Pinnacol a desired destination for Denver’s high school students. And the imperative is strong.
Pinnacol, Colorado’s largest workers’ comp insurer, has a rapidly aging workforce, and it has struggled to hire and train up people as fast as that workforce is retiring. That’s true even factoring in the increasing ability of artificial intelligence and software automation to take on certain tasks.
“One of our biggest pain points is we have a lot of experts at Pinnacol but our employee base is aging,” says Wilmes, the company’s apprenticeship program manager.
The Big Idea: Since 2017, Pinnacol has been running one of the only youth apprenticeship programs in the country at an insurance company—aimed at bringing in new talent and broadening the appeal of the industry. Pinnacol has about 17 apprentices at any one time, with about half now accepting full-time roles once they complete their three-year apprenticeship.
It’s an all-in model, with two full-time staff, that requires substantial buy-in and resources amid a rapidly shifting market. Pinnacol had to cut back on the number of apprentices, for example, as costs rose significantly alongside the state’s minimum wage. But company officials point to data showing that its investment continues to pay off—in part because the program has evolved with the market.
“It’s driven by a business need and ROI,” says Brent Parton, president of CareerWise, a national apprenticeship intermediary that works with Pinnacol.
Pinnacol just recruited and trained its first AI data scientist apprentice, for example, a role that the company is building alongside its own understanding of how the technology might remake its work. That kind of flexibility has been key to the longevity of the program, Parton says—and it’s what makes Pinnacol’s approach a good model for the broader industry.
“The sign of success is that discussion around evolution,” he says.
Closing the Gap Between Varsity and Pro
The Model: When Pinnacol began to build its apprenticeship program, it looked at Aon and Zurich NA, both insurance and financial services companies with two of the most robust apprenticeship programs in the United States outside of the trades. Both are founding partners in the Chicago Apprentice Network, which aims to expand the approach in “new-collar” roles. Their apprenticeships, though, don’t start in high school.
Pinnacol decided that the first part of its apprenticeship program would be focused on teaching business essentials, making explicit the expectations, rhythms, and culture of office work. Apprentices start working on their teams—claims and underwriting, marketing, customer service, or software development, etc.—after the first month but with a lot of support.
“This is how we close the gap between high school and being a professional,” Wilmes says.
Pinnacol’s apprenticeship also has more of a focus on exploration than those for older adults, who often are training for a specific job. While Pinnacol’s apprentices graduate prepare to transition into a specific full-time role—and the company is eager to hire them—they see part of their role as growing the talent pool in Denver more broadly.
The company originally started with just two general apprentice roles, business and tech, but has since grown the program to nine registered apprenticeship programs in more specific fields, including underwriting and data analysis. That allows the company to meet more tailored business needs and appeal to apprentices’ unique interests, while still allowing room for more general career exploration.
Selling Point: That combination appealed to Eleazar Mier Tellez, a 17-year-old, first-year apprentice. The men in his family all work in hospitality, like his dad, or construction. Tellez thought he definitely wanted to go into real estate, but an advisor connected to the TRIO program at his public high school urged him to consider Pinnacol’s apprenticeship program.
He now works in the special investigations unit at the company, and that led him to dig deeper into accounting through a community college class. That business discipline turned out to not be his forte, but he’s excited about exploring options in international business—which he’s also been exposed to a bit through his apprenticeship.
No matter where he lands, Tellez says he’s now much clearer that the options open to him aren’t just construction or real estate. “Just being able to work in a corporate setting, that was completely new to me and something that I thought would never be for me,” he says.
Short and Long-Term Returns
The ROI: The apprenticeship program isn’t just about the long-game though. Apprentices do work that, among other things, saves Pinnacol money on temporary hires and overtime. Last year, apprentices took on overflow work and covered for paternity leave for seven full-time employees.
The program also has “a ripple effect on other employees,” with an estimated six figures in savings in retention costs over time, says Mindy Carrothers, marketing and communications manager for the firm. Employees who supervise the apprentices are more likely to advance with the company, with 50% seeing a promotion within three years of managing one of the young workers.
When the company does convert an apprentice to a full-time hire, it saves at least $4,500 in recruiting and onboarding costs, and as much as $25K for hard-to-fill tech roles.
The People: Daejahn Wallace, a second-year apprentice, is training for one of those roles, doing quality assurance for the software team. Quality assurance wasn’t really on his radar before, and he says a lot of his peers in the computer science program at University of Colorado Denver, which he attends along with apprenticing, are still not clued into the real market for entry-level tech jobs.
“After being in the industry, it’s revealed to me that the development jobs that a lot of people want are a lot more difficult than people think,” he says.
Wallace pursued the apprenticeship because he wanted a leg up. He’s happily found that it also gives him a strong group of peers to keep him motivated and to just hang out with.
“I can’t imagine being alone and just having coworkers who are double my age,” he says. “The apprenticeship is a bit of a sacrifice because it blocks off part of your day and you can’t go to football games or spend time hanging out with friends.”
It’s Fatima Amador’s job to help the cohorts bond. Now the full-time apprenticeship program facilitator, she joined Pinnacol in 2018 in one of the earliest groups of apprentices. Amador had never heard of apprenticeships and she found out about Pinnacol’s by happenstance—through a neighbor who was a high school teacher and knew Wilmes.
Amador’s father had stopped his education after second grade and worked as a restaurant cook, and while her mother was a college-educated accountant in Mexico, she couldn’t get certified in the United States. Money was always an issue for the family, Amador says, and she didn’t see any way she could afford to go to college.
She applied to the apprenticeship, got in, and after just a year in the program, moved into a full-time role as a director assistant for the insurance teams. Her career has grown from there. It’s now her job to make sure more students hear about the kinds of career paths—like hers—that apprenticeships can open up.
“I don’t want these types of opportunities to be accidents for students,” she says.
Evolving in Turbulent Times
Workers’ comp insurers that are state-specific, like Pinnacol, are wrestling with how to adjust their business models with the rise of remote work. And the insurance industry broadly is being buffeted by an aging workforce, rising costs of claims, and rapid technological change. Generative AI and other forms of automation are remaking the mix of roles in the industry, but they are unlikely to alleviate the overall shortage of the workers, at least within the next decade.
As roles doing the simplest underwriting and claims work potentially decline, tech roles and those for specialists handling more complex cases are primed to grow. In workers’ compensation, policies and claims tend to be more complex than in sectors such as auto or home. The apprenticeship program is designed to evolve with changing labor needs.
In many ways, Parton of CareerWise says, apprenticeship is ideally suited for preparing workers amid uncertainty. Apprentices are experimenting with technologies like generative AI for the first time just like every other worker. Training programs aren’t behind industry, he says, but rather are being created at the same time the jobs are.
“It’s building alongside industry for the first time in decades instead of trying to catch up to the world around it,” Parton says.
Durable Skills: Interpersonal communication is one skill that is likely to be of enduring importance. It’s also a persistent challenge. Many of the apprentices struggle to talk with people—and for most of them, a big part of the job is customer service.
“It’s not easy—let’s not sugar coat it,” says Wilmes. “You’re taking high schoolers who have never had a job before and you’re trying to put them with customers, who are either business owners or injured workers. With business owners, you’re talking about their money; with injured workers, it’s pain and suffering.”
Navigating that takes both poise and empathy. That’s hard to teach. But it is also the kind of deeply human skill that is likely to remain essential in the insurance industry, especially workers’ compensation, even as AI can increasingly take on more straightforward tasks.
So Wilmes now has first-year apprentices regularly volunteer at Metro Caring, a community organization, where they help run a food bank and assist people with applying for state IDs. The experience has helped the apprentices—even the self-described “really anti-social” one—get used to regularly interacting with strangers and helping them navigate stressful or confusing situations.
“We saw an incredible amount of growth,” Wilmes says.
Parting Thought: Wilmes understands that other companies, even those facing major talent shortages, might not want to take on that level of commitment. Intermediaries like CareerWise can help with some of the heavy lifting, she says, or companies can start small with work-based learning, even just a single intern.
The benefits of making a bigger investment, though, are also bigger, Wilmes says.
“Yeah, there are challenges and other businesses may say, ‘That’s a lot to take on,’” she says. “But there’s opportunity in that challenge.”