Career Crossroads - Property RE vs. Property UW vs. Renewables
Currently a large property risk engineer at a major carrier and trying to think strategically about long-term career direction before opportunities potentially move quickly.
Background:
- 5-10 years experience
- Mechanical Engineering degree and experience in R&D design engineering role early career
- Found insurance with Equipment Breakdown risk engineering
- Expanded to commercial property risk engineering
- Heavy manufacturing/general industry exposure
- I like both equipment breakdown and property
- Customer-facing role with lots of operational/site exposure
I do genuinely enjoy engineering (usually). I like the technical side, the site visits, learning operations/processes, meeting customers, etc. I’m naturally curious and still enjoy the risk assessment process itself. For the most part. Nobody likes being buried in reports. I also dislike being tasked with tedious nit picky deficiencies that are low value.
That said, I’ve become increasingly interested in underwriting because it seems like that’s where a lot of the larger business decisions ultimately come together. Pricing, structure, portfolio strategy, balancing growth vs discipline, etc.
Engineering informs the process, but underwriting owns the tradeoffs and final decisions.
Underwriters and UW managers have reached out if I could ever be interested in that side of things.
To throw a curveball, I’ve also been interviewing externally for a renewable energy risk engineering role focused on things like utility-scale renewables/BESS/etc. They specifically like my equipment breakdown background because many candidates apparently came from more traditional property-only backgrounds.
So I’m trying to think through 3 potential paths:
- Do nothing and stay in large property risk engineering and continue building technical depth
- Internal move into large property underwriting
- External move into renewable energy/specialty risk engineering, potentially with the hope of moving into specialty underwriting later?
I realize nobody can answer this for me, but I’d be interested in hearing from people who:
- moved from engineering into underwriting
- stayed technical and specialized
- work in renewable energy underwriting/engineering
- regretted (or didn’t regret) specializing too early
- think the long-term ceiling/opportunity is stronger on the specialty side
Main thing I’m trying to figure out:
Is it smarter long-term to build underwriting/commercial skills now while I already have technical credibility, or build a differentiated specialty technical niche first and potentially pivot to UW later?
Curious how others in the industry would approach this.