Insurance Agents - Getting Started in a Career in Insurance

An insurance career, like any career in sales, has the potential for great rewards with a bit of luck and hard work. At the same time, as most agents are for the most part independent and paid entirely based on commission, there is no salary to fall back on and no one to carry you when times get hard.

Although many insurance companies will require that new agents they hire have a college education, this is not required by the state and many independent agents set up private brokerages and sell coverage and policies from various companies without actually working for any individual company. In general, if you are just getting started in your insurance career, it is easiest to start out with a company or brokerage of some kind, where you can work with and learn from your fellow agents.

For more information about how to obtain an insurance license in your state (each state has rules and regulations that are specific to that state, even though these are usually similar across different states), contact your state Department of Insurance, or contact the National Insurance Producer Registry, an organization that works hand-in-hand with many states to help new agents get licensed.

Also, remember that starting out in insurance, there can be fairly large differences in salaries in the different insurance lines, for example, between life/health vs property/casualty insurance base salaries.

It is usually easier for a life & health agent when they are first starting out, with larger commissions upfront, while property and casualty agents take a bit longer to get going but are easier to build into more of a snowball effect. Usually it is fairly easy to maintain a large number of policies with a large number of customers with minimal interactions over the lifetime of the account, most of that upfront. In fact, many successful agents years into their insurance career are able to offload a large portion of their work onto the office staff they they end up hiring to cover most tasks such as answering the phone, etc.

In short, a career in insurance can be a great way for a person to get started on their own quickly, and is something that can be built into quite a decent salary (six figures are not at all uncommon) after just a few years of hard work.

Insurance career education and training providers are available to help guide you through the process of becoming an agent. If you are interested in a career in insurance, see our site at http://www.cpmipro.com/ for more information.