Name: Georgie Corbett
Role: Senior Manager, Allstate NI
It always starts with a cup of tea and a chat with colleagues (at least, it did when I could go to the office!), followed by spending time checking my emails to see what’s happened during our night time. I’ve worked for global companies for more than 10 years now so there’s always something going on, even when we’re sleeping!
The rest of my morning tends to be spent on 1-2-1s with my local management team or attending Allstate NI leadership meetings including our Women in Technology group and our Business and Government Engagement track as I am a core member of both.
At lunchtime my US teams come online so the afternoons are mostly spent in meetings - planning upcoming work, reviewing work in progress, talking to vendors or working 1-2-1 with my global managers as I have direct responsibility for the Oracle teams across all our locations.
Alongside my day to day work I’m currently leading an effort to re-structure my area to ensure that we’re as efficient and effective as possible, whilst still providing top class service to all the business areas across Allstate that we support.
And, because pretty much all applications have a database behind them, that covers all the business areas in Allstate!
From the outside I had seen Allstate transform dramatically through their presence at many local events and the type of work that was being done there.
I was looking for a new challenge and, when this role came up, it was a great match for my skillset and ambitions.
It wasn’t an industry I wasn’t really aware of when I was at school and university. I selected to study engineering at university due to my interest in maths and science and I knew that it would allow me to keep my options open to future careers.
In my final year I attended a recruitment talk by an IT Consultancy that piqued my interest and the rest, as they say, is history.
People and delivery. I love working with people across the world, identifying ways to improve ourselves, our technology and our business and delivering on those opportunities.
Really look into what it means. There are so many different roles across the industry that suit so many different skillsets.
We still have such a long way to go in order to see real equality in our industry, especially from a gender perspective, and breaking down stereotypes and demonstrating the wide variety of work available will be key to that.
As an American insurance company, the technology that I work on impacts lives right across the US.
As we look to the future, the data that we have and the applications that we build, will be able to keep people safer and genuinely help save lives. That’s pretty cool.
My beginnings in this field were almost by accident but, through my career, I’ve been lucky to work with a number of managers and directors who were role models to me and who invested time in me to help progress my career.
In terms of working in STEM, in general, my own mum is my inspiration! As a pharmacist starting her career in the early 1970s she was one of only a handful of females in the industry but, to me, it made my own interest in STEM subjects completely normal and encouraged me to look towards a career in that area.
There have been so many it’s hard to pick just one but our ability to use data to make informed, intelligent decisions impacts so many areas it has to be one of the most important.
We just need to be careful to ensure that we don’t build implicit bias into our AI/ML algorithms as we mature this area of technology.
Sadly it’s definitely my mobile phone – my whole life is on there. I do rely more than I’d like on Alexa as well….it’s just too easy to talk to tech instead of making the effort to type something!
