Marine Claims Assistant
Chaucer Insurance

Charles B

00:00:03 Charlie, and I’m a Claims Adjustor on the Marine side. There’s a huge variety of people that we work with insuring boats effectively, or ships, vessels, as they like to call them, and as I say often in this case kind of the cargo which is on the vessel as well. So often on a chartered basis, so you’d insure the vessel from A to B, or possibly for an entire year.

00:00:31 I’ll be honest, insurance wasn’t – I think it’s one of these things which, if you speak to a lot of people in the marketplace, they would say that they’ve perhaps slightly fallen into it. It wasn’t so much a career path which – or career which they’ve wanted since they were a young age. But I originally wanted to go into Ship Broking, and when I left University in 2005 the market wasn’t particularly conducive to taking on graduates at that time. And one of the people I spoke to, and became quite familiar with, said that going into Marine Insurance would be a very good alternative. And then if you decided after a period of time you wanted to change your career and go back into the Ship Broking profession, then the job you would have previously had wouldn’t be too disjointed from that.

00:01:16 I actually did Geography at University which has got little if any relation to shipping at all. I think there’s very much a – this feeling that if you’ve got a degree from a University you’re perhaps better off than if you haven’t. I don’t necessarily agree with that all the time, I think that a lot of people that work for the company I work for have got – you know they’ve come straight from school and they’ve been extremely successful. But I mainly did Geography because it’s very generic, there’s no – I wasn’t going to leave University after three years and feel like I was tied to doing anything in particular. So I guess from that perspective Geography was a kind of – it left my options open when I left University.

00:02:01 I grew up in Cornwall, and went to school down in Devon, just across the River Tamar. I think I just wanted a change. I’ve lived in the countryside all my life, and London’s got that vibrancy about it, the kind of – a lot of my friends from both school and a lot of my friends from University have all ended up here. There’s so much to do in London it’s unbelievable. I mean free museums and things like that, or sport, I play a lot of tennis.

00:02:31 I have travelled before. I took a gap year between school and University, and went to Africa for four months, and then I did a ski season as well, which I’d highly recommend. If I hadn’t taken a gap year I think I’d still have the kind of – the itch that I hadn’t ever had the chance to go away. I’d have gone straight from school, straight to University, and straight into a job. I think I took it at the perfect time and came back, and I now don’t feel like I need to go away for a really long period of time. Although when people tell you that they do it’s always slightly annoying.

00:03:08 At the moment I’ve – I mean right now I probably still see myself in insurance in ten years’ time. I’ve had a great three years, or coming up to three years in a couple of months, and I see no reason why that would change at the moment. As I say maybe I’ll get the itch and want to go back to the Ship Broking, which I’d always kind of set out to achieve. But at the moment I’m working with a great group of people in a very good company that look after you and what have you, so – no, in ten years’ time I’d like to say I’d probably still be here, but as I say things might change.

ENDS