A good CV makes it easy for an employer to understand what you can do, where your experience fits and why you are worth interviewing.
That means being specific. For example, saying you are “experienced in commercial insurance” tells a recruiter much less than explaining the clients you support, the policies you handle and the responsibility you hold.
Whether you are applying for your first insurance job or your next senior role in the industry, here is how to build a CV that gives insurance employers useful evidence of your suitability.
What insurance employers want to see
A good place to start is with the job description. Identify the essential experience, technical knowledge and personal skills that are required for the role, then choose your own examples that best demonstrate them.
Depending on the role, this might include assessing risks, negotiating cover, managing claims or maintaining accurate records. Employers will also generally want to understand how you communicate, make decisions and work with customers or colleagues.
You should also check that your CV answers the practical questions: which classes of business have you worked with? How complex were the cases? What could you decide independently, and when did you refer to someone else?
How to structure your insurance CV
Two pages is a good aim as a starting point, allowing more space if and when substantial relevant experience justifies it. It is also a good idea to use clear headings, a readable font and consistent dates.
A good structure would be:
- Your name, phone number, professional email address, location and LinkedIn profile
- A short professional profile
- Relevant technical knowledge and skills
- Employment history, starting with your most recent role
- Professional qualifications, education and relevant training
If you are early in your career, you should place your relevant education or projects above your employment history in your CV.
You can also usually leave out a photograph, date of birth and marital status.
Writing a strong professional profile
Use three or four lines to summarise your relevant experience, strengths and the role you are targeting. Try to avoid opening with statements like “hardworking team player” unless you immediately provide something more meaningful.
For an insurance broker CV, for example, a profile could read:
Commercial account handler with four years’ experience supporting SME clients across property, liability and professional indemnity insurance. Experienced in managing renewals, preparing market presentations and explaining cover options. Seeking a broking role with greater responsibility for client relationships.
Presenting your insurance experience clearly
For each position, include your employer, job title and employment dates and add a short description of your remit, followed by a few bullets covering relevant responsibilities and achievements.
The aim here is to give the reader enough context to understand your level of experience and capabilities. “Supported commercial renewals” could mean collecting information, negotiating terms or managing the whole process, so try to explain your involvement in more detail.
Also seek to distinguish between work you owned and work you supported. For example, an underwriting assistant who prepared risk information for referral should describe that contribution accurately.
In terms of priority, give your more recent and relevant roles the most space on your CV - earlier positions can be shorter and more to the point.
How to demonstrate measurable achievements
Numbers help employers understand the scale and impact of your work, and useful measures include portfolio size, renewal retention, case volumes, turnaround times and quality results.
Describe the action and result together. For example:
- Managed renewals for 120 SME clients, increasing client retention from 91% to 95% over 12 months.
- Introduced a submission checklist that reduced incomplete underwriting referrals by 25% over six months.
- Reduced an aged claims backlog from 60 cases to 35 while maintaining the team’s file-quality standard.
Be clear about the timeframe and your personal contribution. If a result belonged to the whole team, say so.
Only use figures and data you can substantiate and are allowed to share. Where numbers are unavailable, you can explain the improvement - such as making handovers clearer or helping new colleagues handle cases independently.
Showing technical knowledge and qualifications
Use your CV to showcase the products and classes of business you know, such as commercial property, motor fleet, cyber or professional indemnity. Add relevant client sectors, territories and systems where they strengthen your application.
You should also explain your level of experience, as tasks like processing policy amendments, negotiating terms and designing insurance programmes involve different responsibilities.
When listing completed professional qualifications, use their full names and include completion dates. Separate these from any ongoing study and state which units you have passed – and only use the professional designations you are entitled to use.
For regulatory knowledge, describe relevant work you have carried out, such as handling complaints, supporting vulnerable customers or maintaining compliant client records. Avoid claiming broad expertise based only on something like completing an annual training module.
How to present transferable skills
If you are moving from another sector, connect your experience to the work you want to do in insurance.
Customer service can provide evidence of explaining information clearly and handling difficult conversations. Sales can demonstrate relationship management and identifying customer needs. Administration can show accuracy, organisation and control of deadlines.
Give an example that makes the connection credible, for example:
Managed a caseload of customer complaints, investigated account records and coordinated responses within agreed deadlines.
That gives a claims employer something concrete to assess. This is also why it is important to describe the skills you already have honestly and identify the insurance knowledge you still need to develop.
Tailoring your CV for underwriting, broking and claims
An insurance underwriter CV should highlight risk assessment, pricing and decision-making, while also including relevant classes, authority levels and referral responsibilities. Where appropriate, show how you contributed to portfolio performance and broker relationships.
An insurance broker CV should explain your client base, market knowledge and involvement in placing or renewing cover. Highlight understanding client needs, negotiating terms and explaining policy conditions.
For claims roles, specify aspects like the claim types, complexity, caseload and settlement authority where relevant. Demonstrate investigation, communication and sound decisions alongside service or quality results.
Use the vacancy and full job description to decide which experience deserves the most attention.
Writing a CV with no insurance experience
If you have no relevant experience in the insurance industry, you can build your application around evidence of your potential to learn and contribute. Include relevant coursework, placements, part-time jobs, volunteering or projects.
For example, a university research project might demonstrate analytical thinking, retail work might show customer communication and accuracy under pressure and organising a society event could demonstrate planning and teamwork.
Any introductory insurance study, employer events or relevant work-shadowing can help show that you have explored the sector.
Keywords and applicant-tracking systems
Use terminology from the advert and job description where it accurately describes your experience. If the role asks for commercial property knowledge, for instance, then make that experience explicit.
Spell out specialist terms on first use, such as professional indemnity (PI) and keep keywords within meaningful descriptions of your work.
For your CV, choose a simple, single-column layout with standard headings as some applicant-tracking systems can struggle to extract information from CVs with more complicated columns, tables, graphics or text boxes. Follow the employer’s file-format instructions and check any fields populated from your uploaded CV.
Common insurance CV mistakes
Make sure you remove vague claims, unexplained abbreviations and long lists of duties that give no sense of your contribution. Also check that you have distinguished premium income from brokerage revenue and individual results from team performance.
If you use AI to help draft your CV, be sure to review every sentence and correct any invented achievements, inflated responsibilities or wording you could not explain comfortably in an interview.
Your final CV checklist
Before submitting, check that:
- Your profile and strongest examples match the vacancy.
- Your responsibilities, technical knowledge and qualifications are accurate.
- Your achievements show what you contributed.
- Dates and job titles are consistent with your application and LinkedIn profile.
- Contact details, spelling and formatting are correct.
- You have followed the employer’s submission instructions.
Put your new CV to work by exploring the latest insurance jobs.