Top 12 Insurance Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume
Landing and thriving in an insurance manager role means showing you can steer through risk, regulation, data, and people without flinching. The right skills, well told, do the heavy lifting on your resume. Put them front and center, prove you’ve got the chops, and doors open.
Insurance Manager Skills
- Risk Assessment
- Underwriting
- Claims Management
- Salesforce CRM
- Financial Analysis
- Regulatory Compliance
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Data Analysis (e.g., Excel, Tableau)
- Leadership
- Negotiation
- Project Management (e.g., Asana, Trello)
- Policy Development
1. Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is the disciplined process of spotting, sizing, and prioritizing threats and exposures that could damage customers, portfolios, or the insurer’s balance sheet—and deciding how to avoid, reduce, transfer, or price them.
Why It's Important
It anchors pricing, reserves, and product strategy. Done well, it protects solvency, sharpens underwriting, and steadies results when markets lurch.
How to Improve Risk Assessment Skills
Sharper, faster, fewer blind spots. Aim for that.
Deepen data quality: Standardize intake, validate sources, and fill gaps with credible third-party data where policy and regulation allow.
Use predictive models: Apply regression, gradient boosting, or GLMs to forecast frequency and severity. Back-test relentlessly. Monitor drift.
Blend human judgment with automation: Rules for routine, specialists for edge cases. Escalation paths crystal-clear.
Refresh assumptions: Update peril maps, socio-economic factors, climate impacts, and litigation trends on a set cadence.
Tighten customer data capture: Ask what matters, not everything. Minimize noise, respect privacy laws, log consent.
Collaborate across functions: Underwriting, actuarial, claims, risk, and IT should share signals and definitions. One language, many lenses.
Stay regulator-ready: Align criteria with current rules and guidance. Document methods and decisions in plain language.
Better inputs, smarter models, disciplined governance. The trifecta.
How to Display Risk Assessment Skills on Your Resume
2. Underwriting
Underwriting determines if, how, and at what price coverage is offered by evaluating risk drivers, coverage terms, and portfolio impact.
Why It's Important
It’s where profit is set—or squandered. Strong underwriting balances growth, risk appetite, loss performance, and regulatory guardrails.
How to Improve Underwriting Skills
Elevate data and guidelines: Clean data, clear playbooks, calibrated authority levels. Exceptions tracked, not shrugged.
Modernize tooling: Use underwriting workbenches, straight-through processing for simple risks, and decision support for complex ones.
Model-enabled judgment: Blend predictive risk scores with human context. Require rationale when overriding scores.
Continuous learning: Case reviews, loss learnings, market updates, and credentialed training. Curiosity rewarded.
Portfolio view: Price the single risk; manage the whole book. Concentration limits enforced.
How to Display Underwriting Skills on Your Resume
3. Claims Management
Claims management handles intake, triage, investigation, evaluation, settlement, recovery, and closure—fairly, fast, and within policy terms.
Why It's Important
It’s the truth moment for customers. Great claims cuts leakage, thwarts fraud, preserves reserves, and wins loyalty.
How to Improve Claims Management Skills
Automate the grind: Straight-through for simple claims, guided workflows for the rest. Fewer handoffs, tighter SLAs.
Specialize: Segment by complexity and line of business. Assign experts to the messy stuff.
Communicate clearly: Status updates, timelines, and next steps—no black boxes. Plain language beats jargon.
Analytic vigilance: Outlier detection, severity forecasting, supplier scorecards. Act on the patterns.
Fraud controls: Rules plus machine learning, verified data sources, and swift referrals. Measure hit rates.
Customer care: Empathy, transparency, and options. One poor interaction costs years of goodwill.
How to Display Claims Management Skills on Your Resume
4. Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM centralizes client data, policies, opportunities, and service interactions, letting insurance teams work from one source of truth with automation and analytics layered in.
Why It's Important
It tightens pipeline control, sharpens retention, speeds service, and turns scattered data into action. Better visibility, better decisions.
How to Improve Salesforce CRM Skills
Tailor for insurance: Configure objects, page layouts, and record types for policies, endorsements, and renewals. Consider Financial Services Cloud with insurance features where it fits.
Integrate core systems: Link policy admin, billing, and claims so reps see the whole customer story.
Automate with Flow: Sunset old Process Builder rules. Standardize on Flow for assignments, renewals, alerts, and approvals.
Use CRM Analytics: Leverage Salesforce CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM/Einstein Analytics) for retention risk, cross-sell, and service insights.
Omni-channel service: Phone, email, chat, portals—routed smartly, tracked tightly. Knowledge articles kept fresh.
Adoption and governance: Train, measure usage, declutter fields, enforce naming and data hygiene. A clean org is a fast org.
How to Display Salesforce CRM Skills on Your Resume
5. Financial Analysis
Financial analysis interprets statements, ratios, reserves, reinsurance costs, and investment outcomes to guide pricing, capital use, and risk.
Why It's Important
It protects solvency, exposes margin leaks, and informs strategic tradeoffs—growth versus profitability, risk versus return.
How to Improve Financial Analysis Skills
Master insurance metrics: Loss and combined ratios, reserve adequacy, loss triangles, RBC/solvency measures, expense ratios.
Use the right tools: Spreadsheet modeling, BI dashboards, actuarial outputs. Automate recurring analyses, version-control assumptions.
Scenario thinking: Stress and reverse stress tests. Interest rate shocks, cat events, social inflation—plan the “what ifs.”
Tie to strategy: Link analytics to pricing, reinsurance, and product decisions. No orphaned insights.
Stay current: Follow industry results, accounting changes, and regulatory updates. Adjust methodologies when the ground shifts.
How to Display Financial Analysis Skills on Your Resume
6. Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory compliance means operating within the laws, rules, and supervisory expectations that govern insurance—licenses, filings, disclosures, privacy, conduct, solvency, the works.
Why It's Important
It preserves licenses, avoids fines, builds trust, and keeps customers safe. Noncompliance is costly, fast.
How to Improve Regulatory Compliance Skills
Map obligations: Inventory requirements across all jurisdictions you write in. Owners, due dates, evidence, and controls documented.
Policy and control design: Clear procedures, second-line oversight, and audit-ready artifacts. Change management baked in.
Train and test: Role-based training, periodic attestations, and control testing. Refresh content when rules change.
Monitor proactively: Regulatory horizon scanning, issue logs, remediation plans with deadlines and accountable owners.
Engage supervisors: Maintain open, timely communication with regulators. No surprises, thorough responses.
Leverage technology: Use compliance management systems for workflow, evidence, and reporting. Reduce spreadsheet sprawl.
How to Display Regulatory Compliance Skills on Your Resume
7. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM in insurance is the craft and system of tracking every interaction—sales, service, renewals—so you can personalize journeys, resolve issues quickly, and grow lifetime value.
Why It's Important
It converts touchpoints into trust. Better retention, higher cross-sell, fewer surprises.
How to Improve Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Skills
Know the customer: Use segmentation and propensity signals to tailor outreach, timing, offers, and service.
Personalize at scale: Templates plus dynamic fields, event triggers, and preferred channels. Respect frequency caps.
Right-fit platforms: Pick CRM tooling that aligns with insurance workflows—policies, claims, renewals, and compliance.
Closed-loop feedback: Surveys, NPS verbatims, call reasons—collected, analyzed, and acted on. Customers feel heard.
Enable self-service: Portals and mobile apps for ID cards, claims status, payments, and changes. Convenience wins.
Coach the team: Train on systems and on empathy. Measure quality, not just speed.
How to Display Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Skills on Your Resume
8. Data Analysis (e.g., Excel, Tableau)
Data analysis turns raw data into direction—patterns, trends, and insights that inform pricing, segmentation, fraud detection, and operational decisions.
Why It's Important
It raises precision. It trims waste. It uncovers risk you couldn’t see and value you might miss.
How to Improve Data Analysis (e.g., Excel, Tableau) Skills
Excel depth: Advanced functions, pivoting, Power Query, and error-proof models. Build once, reuse often.
Visualization craft: In Tableau or similar, design dashboards that highlight outliers and trends without clutter. Tell a story with the numbers.
Data hygiene: Define data dictionaries, handle missing values consistently, and track lineage. Trustworthy data or bust.
Analytic methods: From descriptive to predictive—sampling, A/B testing, classification, and time series. Pick methods that match the question.
Practice on real datasets: Build small projects with real-world insurance problems. Iterate fast, document assumptions.
Community and learning: Courses, forums, meetups—keep sharpening. Share what you learn to cement it.
How to Display Data Analysis (e.g., Excel, Tableau) Skills on Your Resume
9. Leadership
Leadership for an insurance manager means setting direction, enabling people to do their best work, and making tough calls with clarity and fairness.
Why It's Important
Teams mirror their leaders. Strong leadership lifts performance, steadies change, and builds cultures that keep talent.
How to Improve Leadership Skills
Communicate with intent: Listen deeply, say the hard thing kindly, and repeat what matters until it sticks.
Think strategically: See around corners—market shifts, regulatory tides, tech disruptors—and adjust course before it’s urgent.
Build trust: Follow through, share credit, own mistakes. Psychological safety unlocks candor.
Coach growth: Clear goals, honest feedback, stretch assignments. Promote from within when earned.
Lead by example: Integrity, curiosity, and grit are contagious. Put them on display.
How to Display Leadership Skills on Your Resume
10. Negotiation
Negotiation in insurance balances interests across claims, premiums, coverage terms, vendor contracts, and reinsurance—seeking durable agreements that make sense for all sides.
Why It's Important
It protects margins without torching relationships. The art is firmness plus flexibility.
How to Improve Negotiation Skills
Prepare relentlessly: Define must-haves, nice-to-haves, walk-away points. Know the other side’s drivers.
Build rapport: Respectful tone, shared goals, clean facts. People say yes to people they trust.
Ask and listen: Questions surface constraints and hidden value. Silence works; use it.
Trade, don’t cave: Concessions paired with asks. Document agreements as you go.
Practice: Role-play tricky scenarios. Debrief what worked, what wobbled, and why.
How to Display Negotiation Skills on Your Resume
11. Project Management (e.g., Asana, Trello)
Project management tools help organize initiatives—renewal campaigns, system upgrades, compliance remediations—so teams deliver on time and on budget.
Why It's Important
Clear ownership, crisp timelines, less chaos. Work moves, dependencies don’t bite, outcomes improve.
How to Improve Project Management (e.g., Asana, Trello) Skills
Define success early: Goals, scope, timelines, and metrics agreed up front. Changes controlled, not accidental.
Standardize templates: Build reusable boards for common insurance workflows—intake, approvals, QA, sign-off.
Integrate the stack: Calendar, email, docs, and chat connected. Status lives in the tool, not in someone’s inbox.
Rituals that work: Brief standups, visual boards, and frequent reviews. Escalate blockers quickly.
Automate routine steps: Recurring tasks, reminders, and checklists. Keep humans for judgment calls.
Retrospectives: After delivery, capture lessons and fold them into the next template. Improve the system, not just the task.
How to Display Project Management (e.g., Asana, Trello) Skills on Your Resume
12. Policy Development
Policy development designs and refines insurance products and guidelines—coverage terms, exclusions, endorsements—aligned with customer needs, risk appetite, and law.
Why It's Important
It shapes what you sell and how you serve. Clarity reduces disputes. Smart design grows share without courting trouble.
How to Improve Policy Development Skills
Anchor in regulation: Track rule changes across markets. Bake compliance into wording and workflows.
Co-create with stakeholders: Underwriting, claims, legal, distribution, and customers. Field feedback beats ivory-tower assumptions.
Benchmark and test: Compare to market, pilot with limited cohorts, and measure loss impact and satisfaction.
Leverage tooling: Use policy and document management systems for version control, approvals, and audit trails.
Continuously refine: Set review cadences. Retire what underperforms, expand what sings.
How to Display Policy Development Skills on Your Resume
