My employer is an employee benefits general agency, and in a previous post, I profiled that line of business. Explaining what I do also requires profiling, as someone once argued at me that reading scripts at an insurance company’s call center for twenty years doesn’t qualify you as a subject matter expert.
I don’t completely disagree, although I will note that call center employees in the United States can (and do) often move up to positions where they aren’t just reading scripts. That said, I temped at a benefits call center during the 2011 open enrollment season, and learned that even “just reading scripts” requires knowledge of the subject matter. Because of my past experience, which gave me that subject matter expertise, and the way I handled calls, I was tagged as a potential permanent hire.
A co-worker left this gag gift at my desk after a client dubbed me a “benefits ninja.”
(my work)
That, too, was subject matter knowledge, and my professional background does indeed show that I’ve had ample opportunity to develop said knowledge.
Interestingly, I didn’t set out to be in the field of employee benefits at first. For a long time, it just kept happening.
Fifteen years before I worked in the call center, I was hired into a temporary position typing job descriptions and SOPs for a new correctional institution. I got that job simply because I had tested at 70 wpm on the temp agency’s typing test; it was strictly typing duties. But I read what I was typing, and in doing so began learning some of the field. It wasn’t long before I was also asked to work in the filing room as well.
As with the later temporary job, I was tagged for potential permanent hire. This time, though, I accepted the job offer with the Division of Prisons, and that was the start of my time as a state employee. My first position was clerical; I was the administrative support for one of the managers, and I also managed some inventory and did a bit of accounting support.
The manager I worked for also supervised the personnel clerk at that particular site. About a year after I was hired full-time, the incumbent personnel clerk went out on maternity leave. I was assigned to fill in for her during that leave, which meant that when she decided not to come back, I was the natural next hire. It was a promotion and I’d found the work absolutely fascinating. I held that job for three years, and during that time began studying human resources management at a local community college in order to give me the academic background that went along with the on-the-job experience I was already developing.
Times change, though, and if there’s one constant about government operations it’s that they’re always reorganizing. An organizational shift meant I was in danger of being “reduced in force,” which would have triggered a severance package. In cases like that, the state would give applicants priority consideration for other positions; depending on the situation, they would even waive the interview process. I was willing to move to Raleigh, so when an employee benefits payroll clerk position opened up there, I requested and received a transfer.
That position was where I learned about IRC Section 125, requirements about employee withholding, and how employers handled the back end of benefits premium payments. It was interesting, but repetitive, and I was still only in my early twenties. I wasn’t ready to settle down yet, so I left after a few months when I was offered a merit-based hire back into a personnel office. This one was with the Division of Services for the Blind, and involved both recruitment and benefits administration. The latter took more time than the former, as I was also responsible for new hire orientations.
In my first personnel clerk position, I’d found recruitment and selection far more interesting, but with this position my interest in the benefits side began to grow. Managing the orientations gave me an insight into the role benefits played in total compensation, and resolving employee issues helped me understand how important fringe benefits actually were. Around that time, though, my mother’s employer lost its contract when the Division decided to bring those functions back in-house. She was offered the equivalent position to the one she’d already held.
That created a problem, as it would have meant I was handling an immediate family member’s personnel records. To resolve it, I was offered a transfer into a newly-created position with a different government agency. A few months later, a position opened up with the Community College System Office.
I held that job for four years, during which I became acknowledged as a subject matter expert in employee benefits. I served on a couple of committees and even got to the point where I was able to quote portions of relevant administrative codes from memory. In addition, I took advantage of the educational assistance program to finish up my associate degree in human resources management.
Near the end of 2004, I left government employment when I was recruited into the professional employer organization (PEO) industry as a benefits specialist. Ten months after that, the benefits manager resigned and I was assigned some of those duties while they searched for a new one. After a few months with a dearth of acceptable candidates, they simply decided to make that shift permanent, although I was employed as a lead benefits specialist instead of a benefits manager. This position required me to work directly with the PEO’s group benefits account manager, and she taught me a lot.
Some time later, it became clear that, for personal reasons, I needed to leave Raleigh. I picked three likely new locations, applied for jobs in all three of them, and took the first one that was offered to me. It was in Atlanta; thus, I moved to Georgia.
The new job was a bad match, to put it mildly, although it wasn’t because of my lack of knowledge. I won’t go into further detail except to note that the business in question no longer exists. The net effect was that I found myself without a job — or an income — only six months after I’d moved across two state lines. Needing a quick resolution, I turned again to temporary employment. This time, I was placed into a clerical position in the database marketing field.
Due to the turmoil of my last couple of positions, I was feeling burned out on the human resources field, so when I was offered permanent employment I took the position, eager to learn more. I did well over the next three years, as it turned out that I had more transferable skills than even I’d realized. But I couldn’t put my heart into it, and during the fourth year that was unmistakably showing up in my performance. I had to gloss over this fact then, but I can admit it now: I resigned to avoid being terminated. That was when I wound up taking the benefits call center job, during which I did a fair bit of soul-searching to figure out my part in what had gone wrong with my previous two permanent positions.
I did identify some improvements I needed to make, and when I took the permanent position that had been offered starting in January 2012, I did so with a resolution to make those improvements. It worked: although I was hired as a quoting specialist for an employee benefits retail agency, within months I was functioning as a full-fledged account manager. I loved that job, and I might have stayed longer than the six years I did, except that the agency’s owners were nearing retirement and decided to sell to a national company.
Although I survived the ownership transition, when it was explained that I would now partly be evaluated using sales goals, I knew I wouldn’t last long. After I’d spent some time in another temporary position, one of the agents who hadn’t survived the sales transition had an opportunity to open up a benefits practice with a property/casualty agency, and asked me to come on board as his account manager. I agreed, although the position was contract employment, and I held that contract for the next three years.
The combination of nearly ten years as a broker account manager, combined with my previous eleven years in human resources, is what makes me into a subject matter expert on employee benefits, particularly group health insurance. I earned my life/accident/sickness agent license in 2013 — I completed and passed the two-hour licensing exam in twenty-five minutes — and it was openly acknowledged that I could pass the exam for the higher-level counselor license. The only reason I didn’t pursue that was because licensing at that level requires a surety bond, and neither my employer nor I could justify the bond’s cost.
By the end of 2022, I was still enjoying employee benefits, but I’d had more than enough of direct customer service. With only a few months’ exception here and there, I’d been doing front-line customer service since 1992. I’m a natural introvert, which means that kind of contact is not something that comes easily. And I was frustrated, because it seemed like every time I took a back-end job, I was quickly moved into a front-end position since I could do customer service so well…even though it was exhausting me to the point of taking a significant toll on my health, which in turn had begun affecting my job performance. Again.
When I saw the job announcement for my current position, I figured that I probably wouldn’t get an interview since I couldn’t present academic credentials or a lot of references. I applied anyway; I was that frustrated and worn out. I was shocked and surprised when I not only was selected for interview, but was also offered the position. In an interesting twist, I started work on the same day in 2023 that I’d started working on the retail agency side in 2012.
The bottom line is that I’ve held many different positions in the field of employee benefits, including some that were only tangentially related but still gave me useful insights and skills other benefits professionals might not have. Over the thirty years between 1992 and 2022, I developed a unique combination of skill sets: my primary specialty is in employee benefits, but I’m also familiar with marketing concepts and extremely comfortable with technical requirements and technology. I’m also a veteran of the implementations of both HIPAA and PPACA, including the industry adjustments on both. As a result, I can make educated guesses about what might come in the future.
It’s been a long and sometimes broken road to get to where I am, and there have been times I’ve despaired of even being able to hold a full-time job at all. But this new job has renewed my optimism. I’m using all of my skill sets, and it’s back-end work that still keeps me on the front line of developments in the field. I don’t know that I’m going to stay in my current job for the rest of my career, but at the moment I also see no need to pursue any changes. Instead, I’m concentrating on learning and growing even more.
Employee benefits subject expertise is where I belong, and I’m not only perfectly suited for it, but can offer ample proof of the ability to do it well. It’s a niche skill to be sure, but so are a lot of other career fields. I consider myself both lucky and blessed to be able to work in this particular field, and look forward to the remaining twenty-ish years of my career.
The last post in this mini-series will discuss what it is I actually do in my current position.