Peilin Corbanese

Each one of us should build a career and a personal brand that are independent of one's employment. Jobs will come and go. Our personal brand will not. We owe it to ourselves to understand our values to the company we work for, the industry, and the world. If our values and our employer's values are not aligned, consider an exit from the current employer and find alternative paths. When we know our values and build our brands, we will have market security and not only job security. Hold your power.

Upskilling is one of the most important tasks for a career. Devote 10% of your weekly work hours to upskill yourself. Learn from LinkedIn; follow leaders who resonate with you; find mentors and sponsors and have regular conversations; watch YouTube to learn the skills you desire; take a Coursera course; go back to school; request LinkedIn connections and talk to experts in the field. The free options are endless but they require time and dedication. Make yourself a lifelong learner!

Be the changemaker for your team and organization. Champion the change and push for innovation. If you are in front of the change curve, you will lead and will not have to worry about job security. Be enthusiastic. Understand your value and how you fit into the change. If you feel you don't fit well into the change, find a spot on that change curve, advocate for the more appropriate spot, and find allies who will advocate for you. Lastly, if you disagree with the change/innovation, consider finding growth outside the project or the organization. Leave before you are concerned about your job security.

Team engagement is one of the most crucial factors in innovation. It's a leader's responsibility to teach and continously exposing the team to external innovative forces. A leader must share new learnings and create a psychological safe environment for the team members to imagine, explore, and be fearless in experimentation. Ask the team what their goals are for learning and creation. Encourage out of the box thinking. Implement "no ideas is wrong" brainstorming sessions. Implant other changemakers and Innovators in any conversations to help advance the objective and facilitate the meeting.

Collaborating internally is a must for change management and creation of a changmaker mindset. The long-tenured workforce will have a lot of specific knowledge that makes a carrier unique. Be comfortable and open to learn from others. Ask questions. But don't take the lessons as the gospel. Always verify the learnings with data. TRUST AND VERIFY. Then, take one step further, find something the existing workforce does not know and share the findings. It may take time and repeated conversations before the new insights will sink in. The amount of time it takes for a new insight to be adopted by a carrier determines the carrier's ability to compete and win in this new technology and AI-driven world. Let's go!

The insurance industry has a trove of data, often sitting in silos. It's crucial to cleanse, categorize, connect, and link the data to be individual based vs. policy based. Once the data is in a better shape, the data scientists can dig into the specific areas that is correlated to corproate strategy and may show anomalies. Figure out the norms and the outliers. Often this simply analysis will yield some myth-dispelling intelligence. This is step one.