Claims Representative

Her father’s job led her family to live in different international areas with school class sizes varying between 15 and over 600 so it took FA awhile to achieve a comfort level with who she was and what she wanted to be.

FA was born in Virginia, the oldest of three girls. Her father served in the Air Force in Vietnam before his long career with the U.S. State Department as a “crypto technology specialist” which basically meant that he was involved with spyware. Her mother was a social worker, working within coal mining towns in Pennsylvania. 

EARLY SELF-ASSESSMENT

FA’s father’s career required frequent travel and occasionally moving his family from one continent to another. As a freshman in a U.S. public high school, FA’s class size was over 600. The next year, her family relocated to South Africa, where FA’s class size was 15. She returned to the same U.S. high school for her senior year. The differences in class size made it difficult for FA to figure out where she fit in; within a very small school, every student participates in nearly every activity: e.g., student council, sports, plays, music, student newspaper, etc. Obviously, a big difference from a large high school.  

Shifting between different schools slows building relationships with fellow students. It wasn’t until later in her adult years that FA realized having to deal with uncertainties during her high school years caused her to self-assess her talents and interests earlier than many of her peers. 

Each of FA’s parents’ careers involved solving problems by assessing the facts of different situations and then developing ways to manage or improve those situations. FA enjoyed applying such analytical skills to her school studies and decided to pursue a career path which would utilize problem solving analytics: defense intelligence. FA knew this would require a college degree, but she didn’t want to pursue graduate school to qualify as a lawyer or physician. Instead, she considered the following career path: (1) West Point military academy (reflecting her father’s positive and patriotic experience), then (2) C.I.A. agent (reflecting her family’s international experience) to undertake work involving analysis of – and solutions for – issues critical to U.S. national security. 

COLLEGE CHOICE CONSIDERATIONS

One constant in FA’s changing high school world was her coursework; regardless of changing schools and classmates, she could devote herself to her studies at each school and thus achieve grades enabling her to be admitted to every college to which she applied. But how to choose between college acceptances? FA ruled out attending West Point due to the length of a military service commitment required following graduation. Instead, she opted to enroll in a relatively small but academically well regarded school, for several reasons: A. the curriculum offered courses which would require and develop her problem solving skills; B. the school was located close enough to her family’s current residence, to provide an opportunity to occasionally visit with her family, enjoy home cooking and borrow a car as needed; C. the tuition was the least expensive, thereby decreasing the financial burden on her parents who would soon be contributing to the tuition of AF’s two younger sisters. (Editor’s note: many years later, AF’s daughter would return the favor by concurrently enrolling in college and joining the National Guard, which covered many of her college expenses in return for an eventual military service commitment.)

Always willing to work hard in school and in part-time jobs to help support herself, FA worked on campus during her second freshman semester. Then her parents again relocated. (AF now concedes she should not have been surprised since this had been the family’s pattern for a while). Her “safety net” literally moving away, caused AF to even further rely on her own judgment and initiative to cover her personal expenses and look for interesting work within a job, if not yet a career.

In addition to part-time jobs on and off campus during the school year and intervening summers, FA applied for and was granted a scholarship to cover some of her education expenses. She found a State Dept. program which permitted part-time employment whenever her school schedule permitted, leading to post graduation, full time employment as a Civil Servant within the Federal government. 

FIRST JOB NOT BINDING ON EVENTUAL CAREER CHOICE

As a new Federal Civil Servant, FA retained her goal of analyzing important national security issues but in the meantime, she had to deal with an impersonal bureaucracy: for example, following the extended security clearance process, she was assigned to work in the Executive Office of the Department of State. It sounds semi-glorious, but the actual job was not a career path of interest to FA, as it involved typing reports within the personnel department and on occasion, being directed to take a manager’s personal clothing to a cleaner. 

Eventually, FA’s job duties became more interesting after she was transferred to a medical department within the Federal government. Her formal duties involved clearances for State Dept personnel headed overseas but luckily, she had the opportunity to observe radiologists interpreting x-rays and other lung function tests; always wanting to learn more, she asked a few questions about medical imaging and the experienced medical personnel were kind enough to give her a basic education into those processes. Not surprisingly, FA enjoyed medical analytics. 

While she was finally interested in many of her employment activities and her managers offered a position with better job security, the time required to be in her office, balanced against commuting time, made no sense to FA so she left this job without any certain career path ahead. 

Now in her early 20s with (naively) no concern about the need for health insurance (Editor’s comment: many young folks, required to pay their own health care expenses if the need arises, believe they are immortal or at least unlikely to be seriously sick or injured and thus don’t need adequate health insurance), FA drifted among temporary jobs, including restaurant work. Eventually realizing she should seek stable employment with “benefits” she randomly noted an ad by an insurance company seeking employees within either of two departments: claims (analyzing whether claims are covered by the insurance policy and if so, the value of the claim to be paid) and underwriting (analyzing whether the risk should be insured and if so, at what premium cost). The job would provide steady income plus benefits including health insurance! 

SECOND JOB MATCHES INTEREST AND INITIATES A CAREER

A claims representative for an insurance company is required to analyze applicable insurance coverage and the extent to which the claim should be paid. Fortunately, FA’s first insurance company employer provided extensive, quality training for its new claims representatives and FA took full advantage of this learning opportunity, rather than just “showing up” like some of her fellow new hires, interested primarily in the steady paycheck. 

HARD WORK CREATES UNFORESEEN OPPORTUNITIES

When FA devoted herself to learning as much as possible about how to do her claims job most fairly and efficiently for all the interests involved (her employer’s profitability and the insured’s goal to reimburse their loss), her manager noted her dedication to professionalism – after only the first two months! – so when he decided to relocate to another city with another insurance company, he asked if she would be interested in joining him there. For increased compensation, continuing interesting claims analysis (“professional liability” claims involving lawyers and accountants) and the opportunity to relocate closer to her parents (who had likely ceased moving about), why not? 

BUSINESS STABILITY MAY DISAPPEAR, UNRELATED TO AN EMPLOYEE’S POSITIVE JOB PERFORMANCE

There are many possible reasons that a business may be functioning profitably one day but without warning (at least to its employees), be literally closing its doors the next day. As examples: the national economy may be affected by an international virus pandemic or a terrorist attack (flying planes into buildings or using technology to shut down gasoline supplies) or banks being caught with too much bad debt. Or a more mundane reason: business managers decide to consolidate offices by closing the one you are working in and either furloughing employees or offering continuing employment in another office in a different city. 

Without warning, FA’s insurance office was closing, with the opportunity for her to relocate to a different city’s office within the same company. She considered all the factors which would impact her decision (e.g. cost of moving or staying put with resulting commuting time and expense; losing proximity to family; extent of future job satisfaction, etc.) and decided to remain local and seek a different employer, which she found within another insurance company’s Major Claims department, analyzing and handling claims involving diseases possibly caused by long term exposures to asbestos, tobacco, benzene and silica. 

Now with several years’ experience handling various insurance claims, including the analysis of sophisticated medical diagnoses, FA confidently responded to the only question presented by her interviewer, who asked what she knew about asbestos? To which FA replied: “It’s bodily injury claims in volume; how hard can it be?” Apparently, the prospective employer appreciated both her experience and self-confidence in promptly offering her a job. 

COPING WITH AN IMPERFECT BUSINESS WORLD 

Can there be “jumbo shrimp”? Can there be a “small city”? By common sense definitions, those separate words (jumbo and shrimp like small and city) can exist separately but not together. Can there be a “perfect business”? Possibly but hope for the best (stability and interesting work) and plan for the worst: instability of the business (not caused by your job performance) or lack of continuing job satisfaction. Examples of job dissatisfaction which may be encountered: 

– Bureaucratic routines: Having to perform the same, routine tasks required by management, without the need for an employee’s creative thinking and which might even be deemed unnecessary by the employee. 

-Difficult personalities: Being a “jerk” may be a confidential assessment applied to either co-workers or managers; the range of objectionable misconduct ranges from minor annoyances (e.g. having to listen to excessive office gossip) to unlawful sexual harassment.

When an employee is assigned uninteresting work or confronted with difficult personalities, there is no single, best reaction; responses must be considered on a case-by-case basis, ranging from speaking directly to the other person, to filing a complaint with the personnel (“human relations”) dept or even consulting with an attorney. 

During her several decades within the business world, FA encountered several of the above possibilities. This is how she coped:

Uninteresting bureaucratic routines: For one job with minimal possibilities that it could grow into an interesting career, FA sought other employment and when it was lined up, she left her boring job. However, “the grass is not always greener” elsewhere so when the next job involved different requirements which she thought were unnecessary (completing forms requiring lots of irrelevant information) but the job could likely grow into an interesting career, she decided to “live with it” by accepting the routines as relatively minor time drains, compared to her overall job satisfaction while spending most of her time working daily to analyze and handle complex insurance claims issues.

Difficult personalities: FA’s personality always demonstrated a strength of character that dissuaded anyone from trying to take advantage of her; to handle minor annoying behaviors, she simply showed no interest in participating and the annoyances eventually disappeared.

Business instability: When the national economy slowed and the future of her company’s business became at least temporarily uncertain, FA decided to continue her professional education on a part-time, personal time basis by enrolling in evening and weekend courses to add to her knowledge and provide additional certifications to improve her business resume if possibly needed in the future. Her decision to successfully complete these courses had several benefits: (1) created its own satisfaction: I decided to improve my knowledge and I completed all the requirements to do so – no one even suggested that I do it! My idea and my success! Creating such a positive experience can push one through any potentially negative times; (2) new information was useful within FA’s current job: among the routine insurance claims handled by FA were injuries to truck drivers who had delivered products to the insured location; during the extra coursework, FA learned that a truck driver who had completed his delivery and then slipped and fell while wandering about the factory after his delivery was completed, could be legally considered a trespasser to whom no duty was owned by the landowner – thus providing a liability defense to the insured factory owner); and (3) while taking the additional coursework, you might meet other students, thus expanding your network of potential future employers. 

JOB MAY BECOME A CAREER

Since her high school days, FA has needed to work to either provide some discretionary spending money or contribute to the costs of her education while she was a student and later as an adult, to support herself and her child. Thus she had part-time jobs after school and during summer recesses and upon college graduation, full-time jobs, many of which were more uninteresting than interesting but still, she needed to work. 

Eventually, FA found a job which matched her interests: requiring problem solving analysis and utilizing her experience in interpreting medical diagnostic procedures. As she gained more experience applying these interests, her work was appreciated by her management. When job satisfaction dominated the petty annoyances of the business world, FA realized that she was enjoying a career which was no longer just a job.