Questions about career goals Flashcards
From "100 Tough Questions and How to Answer Them"
What are your short-term career goals?
- I hope to manage a team in APR that is working hard to drive our company’s progress forward.
- I aim to develop the leaders of tomorrow and strong associates, fostering their career growth.
- Manage a broad variety of research projects.
- From my time in APR, I have been a part of many of our important corporate initiatives. I would like to tackle those in a senior manager role.
What are your long-term career goals?
- Be a director of a research team.
- Could be in UPM or APR.
- Would like to build and develop a large team (~30 people) that tackles new initiatives that drive our progress forward.
- Support the company by working on initiatives. Broaden my (and my team’s) horizons by working in different subject areas.
What are you looking for in this job?
- Opportunity to tackle our corporate initiatives in a role with higher responsibility.
- I have molded my leadership and analytical skills over the years working on these types of projects.
- Looking to advance my leadership skills: leading a team, communicating, having a bigger role in important discussions.
What will you contribute to this role?
- I have worked in this space for most of my 6 years at GEICO, varying levels of responsibility.
- I add creativity and innovation to the mix.
- I can be an analytical thinker present in big meetings.
- I get things done and am effective in making and implementing plans for a project.
Where do you see your industry going?
- Personal lines auto will need to be nimble and innovative to navigate the competitive landscape.
- Multi-line integration. Focus on customer retention.
- Other carriers (such as Progressive) are rolling out products very quickly. We need to do the same.
- Some carriers focus a lot on non-pricing enhancements to the product (such as AF, vanishing deductible, name-your-price).
- Additional sophistication in our rating model.
What do you consider our missing to be?
- APR: Provide a reasonable price to customer that is adequate and not unfairly discriminatory. Accurately project and consistently maintain rate levels.
- Pricing Analytics: Overall, analytical solutions to pricing business problems. Mostly increased segmentation, speed to market.
Negatives about GEICO?
- Speed to market.
- Innovation.
- Keeping talent.
What attributes will make you a valued presence in this role?
- Proven ability to lead a modeling team.
- Creativity and innovation.
- Ability to make and execute plans.
What areas do I need to develop professionally?
- Communicating a clear, compelling vision.
Greatest professional strength.
- Ability to solve problems with a team. Plan out solution and execute.
Situation where I led a team well.
FL RESET:
- Got the group together.
- Outlined the steps necessary.
- Followed up through completion (Tollgate).
- Helped answer questions.
Situation where we experienced conflict and how we resolved it.
1Q20 Quarterly Planning. Had a quarterly planning meeting and hashed out the projects but the team was dissatisfied with the plan. Felt they were left out of the process if their projects weren’t prioritized.
- Reached out to lead analysts for their feedback.
- Reached out to Bobby and Andrew B for advice.
- Redid the plan with clarity on what our goals were and what we plan to do. Made all associates’ roles were clear and made sure they knew how significant they were on projects.
- We continue to use Retrospectives to monitor morale on the team and address problems accordingly.
What is your management style?
- Clear instructions and honest feedback.
- Encourage cooperation.
- Delegate responsibilities.
- Developing staff is a key role in my job.
- Being relaxed in difficult times. Even-tempered.
Tell me about a time you initiated initiative.
Atomic layer project, early beginnings. Wrote up some thoughts on the data model. Shared those with the group. Was challenged on some topics but revised. Helped me develop a voice in that space.
How do I define success on a project?
I measure success in terms of:
- Delivering a high quality product to a client in a timely manner. Adding value to the company.
- Developing staff.
- Innovation and advancing our best practices.
