A video of nail-biting episode two is available on YouTube. Foster was in the winning team, which dubbed itself Infinite Risk Solutions. The other two Hollardites participating in the competition are Palesa Bolofo (an internal broker consultant in the Property & Energy CoE in Johannesburg) and Keith Bester (head of the Construction & Engineering CoE in the Durban construction engineering division). Foster is a business development manager in Durban.
The reality show-style competition pits eight young insurance professionals against each other in a tournament of tasks that seek to uncover their strengths and weaknesses. We’re very proud of all three of our finalists – Hollard (a Gold sponsor of the competition) is the only insurance company with that many contestants in the mix this year.
The overall winner – who will be announced at the end of March or the beginning of April – gets a bursary from Inseta and will be going to Lloyd’s of London in the UK for a week, to get the low-down on how it does business and on the company’s systems. They also get to do some sightseeing.
“Day one of The Insurance Apprentice 2017. Wow. Tough, tough, tough,” said Foster.
Task one was to deal with and come up with solutions for a high-risk manufacturing client facing non-renewal of cover.
Keith Bester
Bester and Bolofo, both on the team that called itself Expert Risk Solutions, said they learned good lessons from the first contest. “It was good to get feedback from the judges,” said Bolofo, “vital feedback that is definitely going to be used for the next task.”
“That was quite a challenging task,” said Bester. “There was a lot of learning to take home and consider.”
Judges Simon Colman, head of commercial liability at SHA, and Vuyo Lee, an independent insurance consultant, said the competition aims to attract young people to the insurance industry and to identify strong industry talent.
So far so good. No one was sent home. Check out the action on YouTube, and follow the contest on Twitter (@TheInsApp) or Facebook. Go Hollardites!
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