Degrees of preparation.

When Steve Jaeger graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 with a double major in risk management and real estate, he was leaning toward a career in real estate. There was only one problem.

"I had multiple job offers on the risk management side and nothing on the real estate side," says Jaeger, who took the best offer--a position at a brokerage firm in San Francisco--and made a career out of it.

With the economy in similar straits today as it was in 1989, students who want a leg up in the job market and have an interest in a multi-disciplinary job are turning toward risk management in ever increasing numbers, as judged by the increase in academic programs around the country.

With business schools turning out thousands of graduates each year, the very specific risk management career stumps some people. Jaeger says that when he tells people he got a degree in risk management, they say, "You went to school for this?"

"People find it hard to fathom," he laughs.

Job Preparation

According to an informal survey of the largest schools offering risk management and insurance programs around the nation, there's an increasing interest in risk management degrees among business majors. The reason? Job placement at these colleges has often reached 100 percent in the last few years--and that's a plus today, with the unemployment rate hovering stubbornly around 6 percent.

"The risk management and insurance discipline has been somewhat counter-cyclical to the economy," says Joan Schmit, University of Wisconsin-Madison's professor of risk management and insurance and associate dean of the graduate programs at Wisconsin's School of Business. "In response to September 11th, there's been more focus on insurance, on safety. Consciousness about the importance of risk management is expanding."

Dozens of programs around the country specialize in risk management and insurance to varying degrees. The best-known programs include University of Wisconsin-Madison, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, George State University, University of Georgia, Florida State University and Illinois State University. Growth at most of these schools has been impressive. The University of Mississippi's program, for example, has grown four-fold since 1995. Why?

"The old program was--how can I be diplomatic?--on a plateau," says Larry Cox, associate professor of finance and Robertson Chair of Insurance at Ole Miss. "[In 1995] we only had 20 students, so people thought there must not be jobs for them. First, we went out and begged companies ... to come and talk to students at career days. The momentum built upon itself. The students began to learn there were great careers in risk management and insurance."

The numbers are up at other schools as well. Temple University has seen a 400 percent increase in its risk management and insurance program since 1990. At UGA in Athens, Ga., 120 risk management and insurance students graduated in 2002; in 2003, that number will be closer to 140. There's also been a 20 percent increase in MBA students, which includes a risk management and insurance sequence.

"We've seen a two-fold increase in enrollment over the last three to five years," says Robert E. Hoyt, risk management and insurance professor and head of the UGA Insurance, Legal Studies and Real Estate department. "We have more graduates last year than in the previous year and more this year than last. That's practically unheard of in other programs."

It seems that when competition for jobs is fierce due to high unemployment rates, differentiating yourself through degree and professional development programs becomes even more important. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that in the 2002-2003 period there would be a 22 percent increase in the jobs requiring at least a bachelor's degree and a 23 percent increase in jobs requiring a master's degree.

"This 'hit-the-ground-running' philosophy tries to assure that the new employee will take less time in learning the responsibilities of his/her job," says Frank Scanlan, spokesman for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). "Organizations can be pickier because there are more people looking for jobs."

SHRM's employment outlook for 2002-2003 is also interesting: "New jobs will increasingly require both general and occupation-specific skills, will be more demanding, will involve more teamwork and worker participation, and will be in occupations that allow people to think and be creative on the job," the report states.

That multi-disciplinary factor appealed to Lauren Howell, risk manager for Riverside Manufacturing Co., based in Moultrie, Ga.

"I started off as a general business major and took the introductory risk management class as an elective," explains Howell, who earned a BBA in risk management from the University of Georgia. "After that, I decided to select risk management as my major. It appealed to me because it combined accounting, finance, marketing and other areas of business into one major ... not to mention the department's very successful job placement rate."

In the Old Days

Thirteen years ago, Steve Jaeger graduated from UW-M and worked his way from Sedgwick in San Francisco to assistant risk manager positions at Wells Fargo, Sun Microsystems and Delphi Automotive, and in the summer of 2001 became director of risk management at Stryker Corp., a medical products and services company based in Kalamazoo, Mich. He's now looking for a new member to join his department and plans to hire a risk manager directly out of a college program. That's not the way it used to be.

"If you go back far enough, there was a time when brokers just didn't hire right out of college," says Jaeger. "They let the insurance companies hire the green apples [and] train them, and then they'd steal them away from the insurance company."

Corporate risk management departments used to do the same thing: let the insurance companies and brokers train their workers in risk management techniques and then hire them away to manage their risk transfer programs.

But, adds Hoyt from UGA, the highly touted training programs offered by insurance companies have "tended to go the wayside due to cost control."

With ever more challenges facing risk managers, M. Moshe Porat, dean of Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management and a professor of risk management, says, "Risk management today encompasses a much broader definition of what risk is all about. Twenty years ago, risk management was about managing the risk ... of fire, earthquakes. Now, it's about managing financial risks of sorts."

Changing Curriculum

Three things are important for programs, says R. B. Drennan, chair of the Risk, Insurance and Healthcare Management Department at Temple University's Fox School of Business: "That the curriculum is up to date and demanding, that you have an internship experience and that you get involved in an organization."

"Historically, our programs have been closer to the industry than is true for most," says Hoyt of UGA. "We have more of a career focus than other more general degree programs."

Even smaller programs such as the one at the University of Mississippi use the case study model and involve local corporations in students' studies.

Harold Skipper Jr., chairman of the Georgia State University's Department of Risk Management and Insurance, Robinson College of Business, sees an increasing expansion in risk management curriculum: "We believe that the risk management programs of the future must gravitate increasingly toward trying to model risks and understand them quantitatively.

"We're not a substitute for an American Institute's program or an in-house program," he adds. "Our focus must be on building a structure for understanding risk and risk management. We try to broaden the individual's vision, provide that structure that does not change much over time, if we did it right. If we are successful in building that way of thinking, it doesn't make a difference if another 9/11 comes along, if we have another Exxon Valdez or if government does health-care management."

"We've done a reasonable job of keeping up with the trends, and sometimes in anticipating them," says Schmit of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Academic programs have expanded risk management discussions into topics such as alternative risk management, captives, securitization, technical risk management programs and enterprise risk management.

"Saying that, it's always about understanding the basic fundamentals of risk, and those fundamentals will never change," she continues.

Fast Forward

Thirty years ago, most risk managers didn't come from risk management programs--they had general associate or bachelor of business degrees and insurance companies typically created training programs. Risk managers and others in the insurance business continued their studies through professional designation programs, such as the chartered property casualty underwriter (CPCU) and associate in risk management (ARM) certifications. Those types of programs are still popular today, say risk managers.

"We're looking at a higher level of skills required of professional risk managers," says Terrie Troxel, president and CEO of the American Institute for CPCU (AICPCU) and the Insurance Institutes of America (IIA). "We've revised ARM 56 to include alternative risk transfer and non-insurance methods of transferring risk," he says. 'There's a stronger focus on math, statistics. We're perhaps talking about a higher-level individual being a risk manager today."

That's certainly the way Jason Turkovich, risk manager at Pepsi Bottling Group in Somers, N.Y., thinks of it. Turkovich graduated from University of Georgia in 1999 and is two-thirds of the way toward his ARM. "It's a good thing to have on your resume," he says.

Now there's a new twist for risk managers who've already pursued a designation from the American Institutes. This year, Drexel University and Boston University joined Excelsior College, Walden University and the University of Phoenix in giving students credit for some professional development courses in the Institute's programs.

"If anybody would have told me that 20 years ago, I would have told you you're crazy," says Kenneth Dauscher, senior vice president of the AICPCU/IIA marketing and educational services department.

The melding of a professional designation program with an academic degree program helps students avoid the either/or decision. "By combining credits, students don't have to decide: 'Should I go for a designation program for the technical knowledge, or should I get a portable generic credential of a degree?' Now they can get both and double dip," Dauscher says. "For employers, they save money in terms of their employee education assistance programs."

Drexel will offer an online bachelor's degree in communication and technology, and another in general studies, as well as a master's in technology management and a general MBA. Boston University, which is offering n master's in management science, saw it as a way to maximize a corporation's employee assistance dollars, says Dauscher.

Walden is offering an online MBA with a focus on institutional finance and insurance, Phoenix is offering a bachelor's in business administration, and Excelsior is offering a bachelor's in business or liberal arts, and is currently working on an MBA program for the future.

With online educational opportunities, expanding undergraduate and graduate programs in risk management, there are more options than ever for risk managers like Turkovich, whose career trajectory is pointed toward an upper-level position as director of risk management or chief risk officer. He's already got consulting credentials under his belt, having worked with Deloitte & Touche before joining Pepsi.

What does the future hold? Probably more education, such as pursuing a master's of business in finance and learning more about enterprise risk management.

"My initial impression of a risk management degree was that it may be viewed as limited," says Turkovich. "Now, I've found it's far from limited. The knowledge that I learned at UGA gave me a broad background."

RELATED ARTICLE: Programs In crease Focus on Ethics

September 11, 2001, wasn't the only watershed event that affected business programs in general, and risk management programs in particular.

The collapse of companies such as Enron, WorldCom and others due to improper accounting practices and financial fudging has mode the topic of ethics even more valuable in college programs.

"Risk management is a lot about ethics--it's about protecting people and the environment," says Joan Schmit of the University of Wisconsin--Madison. "What I've observed with students is that they are asking more about ethics than they hove before. For example, when we are talking about captives and a fronting company, they will ask if that's an ethical thing to do. I'm delighted that the/re asking those questions. It opens up the discussion instead of me having to raise the issue. It has more power than imposing it [as a topic]."

"In the last year, when all these big issues popped out in the news, we asked ourselves what is important in the way we produce these employees, managers, entrepreneurs of the future," says M. Moshe Porat, dean of the Temple University Fox School of Business and Management and a risk management professor at the school.

As at other schools, the debate was between incorporating ethics across the curriculum versus creating a compulsory course or courses. The solution at Temple was to implement the discussion of ethics into more general courses during the first three years and to focus on corporate ethics in the senior year.

At UW-M, ethics discussions are woven into the curriculum for both the undergraduate-and graduate-level programs.

Maura Ciccardlli can be reached at [e-mail]