Joseph Tagman is pretty sure he knows what’s on potential clients’ minds when they meet with him for the first time, and why they often question him sharply about his work experience.

He’s 28 – a rare age indeed for the insurance industry. He speaks with older business owners and managers about brokering their employee benefits insurance, and understands why they want to make sure he knows his stuff.

“If I was in my 40s and had a business, and a young kid came in, I would hold them to the fire a little bit more than if it was somebody my own age who had been doing it a long time,” said Tagman, who opened his West Boylston brokerage Primary Benefits, in May.

Some young insurance agents and brokers say they are treated exactly the same as their older peers, but others say it’s definitely an issue, or at least that they have to be very much on their toes to prove they know as much as their gray-haired peers.

Stephan Sadlak, a 25-year-old Connecticut property/casualty agent, says one potential client told him straight-up she wouldn’t work with so young an agent, and that he knew of a life insurance agent whose business really took off the year he started going gray.

The Succession Issue

Whether it’s tougher out there for young agents or not, the lingering anecdotes speak to larger issues in the industry: People often expect their agents to be middle-aged or older men because most insurance agents are, in fact, middle-aged or older men.

Issues of succession plague the industry, as the average age of agents creeps upward and many move toward retirement, there’s a lack of fresh blood willing to take over.

The Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America has a group dedicated to engaging with younger members of the profession. Katie Cosgrove of IIABA’s Young Agents Program says 60 percent of current insurance professionals nationwide are older than 45 and looking to retire in the next 15 years.

In terms of industry efforts to gain young workers, she pointed to a free, national “InVEST” program, which is dedicated to “winning the war for talent” by encouraging high school and college students to consider a career in insurance, as well as educating them about their options.

Attracting younger generations to the insurance fold might be tough, considering an InVEST survey indicated that 71 percent of the “Millennial” generation wants to “work with people their own age” and yet most consider the insurance industry as being full of older workers, according to information on its Web site.

Age Preference Goes Both Ways

Phil McGinnis can vouch for that: He’s a wholesale broker with Worcester-based Quaker Specialty Risk, and deals exclusively with other members of the insurance industry. He is younger than just about everybody he works with, and says older guys prefer to work with people their own age, also.

Brothers Michael and David Robinson, both in their 20s, work with their father Charles Robinson at Dennis-based Rogers & Gray Insurance Agency, and say they’ve never felt the least bit slighted because of their relative youth.

They do, however, acknowledge that many insurance agencies don’t have younger agents lined up to take over as the older generation moves toward retirement. Charles Robinson, their father, estimates that a number of factors – including major recent changes in the state’s auto insurance structure – will lead to the shuttering of a full two-thirds of Massachusetts’ insurance agencies. While Robinson’s estimate may be grimmer than others, many local agents do predict a wave of agency closings in the near future.

The elder Robinson – with a touch of fatherly pride – says the younger workers have re-energized the organization, and are remarkably successful. The brothers, who last week attended a Marsh Berry conference for future agency owners, say they’ve also been able to recruit some of their peers to join the business.

The major upside, McGinnis and the Robinsons say, is there are major opportunities to be had for younger agents who stick with the business. Waves of retirements and agency closings will likely mean there is much more business to be mopped up in later years.

Tagman acknowledges the early years of Primary Benefit might be relatively lean, but established players in the business will start winding down their books of business and retiring, leaving a large gap.

Besides, he said, younger agents like him are going to grow up with certain new trends in the industry that older generations prefer not to deal with, such as voluntary benefits.

Overall, he said, “I saw that as an opportunity.”