Become an expert with a career in policy management

“When I was reflecting on it this morning, I kept thinking, “I hope it makes a good story!” That’s what Jessielyn Saludes-Davies, Group Policy Management Manager at Allianz Trade, had to say about the career that she – in her words – manifested.

Here, Jessielyn shares how knowing her worth and developing an expertise, has helped her create a career that ticks all her boxes. 

A couple of years out of university, I took part in an insurance agent workshop hosted by a life insurance agency in the Philippines, my home country. Admittedly, I was partly motivated by the desire to impress an ex-boyfriend’s mum! But I was also in search of a real career, not just a job. I ended up doing really well on the (surprise!) licensure exam at the end of the workshop. Missing just one question, it turned out I was the first person in my town to have ever scored as high. That generated some attention, and I joined a family friend’s life insurance agency as a branch operations specialist shortly afterwards.

It was there that my passion for insurance began, hooking me with my first employer’s slogan, which I’ve never forgotten: Protecting you from womb to tomb. 

I moved to Dubai in 2007. The UAE was booming at the time, so I took my chances and decided to start my job search once I’d arrived in Dubai. It was a good bet; I was contacted by a recruiter at Allianz Trade (called ‘Euler Hermes’ at the time) and joined as office manager and personal assistant to the CEO.

This was really at the beginning of the company’s presence in the Middle East. This meant that the office was small – just four employees – and therefore there was a lot of multitasking, which enabled me to develop a wide range of skills in a diverse environment.

As the company started to grow, I began handling policy management. In that role, at that time, I needed to build Allianz Trade’s procedures, guidelines and processes for working in the Middle East, basically from scratch. It was an interesting and complex task, with many fronting complexities and regional specificities to consider. And that’s when I started truly feeling like an expert. 

Policy management is central to trade credit insurance. We oversee anything and everything related to the policy lifecycle. From the outside looking in, it can look like a lot of administrative tasks. However, I’m always reminding my team that they are experts. We don’t just issue a policy; we have a deep understanding of how it works. It’s easy to take that knowledge for granted but, without it, we wouldn’t be able to translate policy into processes.

And we’re problem solvers! Business development managers (BDM) and account managers will come to us asking us if we can meet a customer’s request. We have to understand exactly what the customer wants, and know how to translate that into a solution that meets their needs – and explain the rationale to the BDMs and account managers, too.

I think it’s really important to understand why you are doing something. Once you understand the impact of what you are doing, you’ll clearly see the value you are adding.