It’s an exciting time to be a young person at Brit, we have a very diverse workforce and those early on in their careers are given opportunities to influence the future direction of the company.
Brit encourage our involvement in key meetings and we are regularly given access to senior members of staff in order to pitch new ideas and provide honest feedback, which is then acted upon. It’s a genuine meritocracy, where age really is just a number and whether you’re 21 or 61, your voice is heard and you are treated with a great deal of respect.
One key thing that I’ve learned is that treating people with respect and actively working with others gets you furthest and that equates to there being a great atmosphere around the office. This is a company where collaboration is actively encouraged and the entire layout of the office is geared towards it. It’s also nice to work for a company where we are actively encouraged to care about the community and the world around us. Whether it’s our work in Kenya, staunch commitment to equality or our efforts to reduce our impact on the environment, you feel that you are working for a company that genuinely cares about making a positive social impact.
The people at Brit are the most important factor in making this a great place to work. While we are a multi billion dollar enterprise, we still retain a small company vibe where everyone knows each other. The company has sports teams, weekly social events and a number of trips throughout the year that mean that the culture is very close knit. Although it sounds cliché, everybody is very welcoming, friendly and will always look to make time for you and help with any questions and issues you may have.
As a Graduate I rotated across a variety of claims teams, including accident and health. Claims in this team are particularly high profile, one minute you can be dealing with rock concert cancellations and next the latest injury to a Premier League footballer. The wide variety of classes, alongside the high profile nature of some of the claims, made this a particularly interesting placement.
I also spent time in the professional indemnity team which focuses on claims of doctors, lawyers and accountants. These claims came from various territories around the world, from the US to Sri Lanka and I got to learn about the working practices of a number of cultures that I hadn’t been exposed to previously
While on the graduate scheme our head of claims tasked me with building a tool that aided in the prediction of the size of our US catastrophic weather events. I was given responsibility for running the entire project, I was able to hire my own temporary member of staff to help and trusted to design the process from start to finish. Once the project was complete I was given the opportunity to present this to a number of members of the executive committee including our Chief Risk Officer and the CEO himself. This is now in the process of being embedded across the group CAT response process.
My involvement in project work has endured post graduate scheme, having been heavily involved in Brit’s efforts to identify and make faster claims payments post North American catastrophe. This has involved partnering with a best-in-class imagery programme based in the USA, allowing us to advance money and adjust claims, where appropriate, faster than any of our competitors in London. Then, collaborating with our Data & Analytics team, we created an algorithm that allows us to automatically identify and triage properties that have suffered damage post catastrophe. All of this work emanated from work initially done on the graduate scheme and then built upon over the proceeding four years.
From day one I’ve always been encouraged to take as many opportunities as possible to develop myself. Brit have given me the opportunity to go to a number of different conferences on a variety of topics and they also frequently run courses designed to enhance your knowledge and skills.
I also attained my ACII qualification which was fully supported by the company.
