PayneWest Insurance offers competitive benefits to battle workforce crunch

A career in the insurance industry doesn’t exactly sound “sexy,” but one Missoula firm is giving its employees generous benefits and career growth opportunities to stave off an impending workforce shortage.

PayneWest Insurance has 434 employees in Montana and 118 in Missoula, and they expect to hire around 100 in the next year. But because the Baby Boomer generation is retiring en masse, the insurance industry expects to lose about 1 million employees to retirement by 2025. The industry will need to fill 400,000 jobs in just the next two years.