Certification - November 2008 - (Page 55)

“Back in the day, when I started as a developer, you had your own little office and they pushed the requirements under [the door], and when it was done you pushed the code out. You didn’t really talk. [But in] this collaborative environment, it’s just mandatory to achieve things quickly.” Because of the state of the market, Symetra’s 200-person IT department, which includes architects, database administrators, application developers, business analysts, quality assurance analysts and project managers, has seen very little turnover. But whenever there is an opening, the department makes a request to the designated human resources recruiter. The recruiter posts the job, screens submitted resumes and presents a subset of the applicants to the hiring manager for review. Once a candidate is highlighted, he or she goes through two or three interviews so the company can get a better idea of the person’s technical skills, soft skills and related experience and determine whether he or she fits with the team. “Soft skills are important because you’re putting [these] people in front of customers, meaning the end users of the application,” Edmonds said. “They have to be able to communicate in both a written and verbal environment effectively. [For example], one of the most important soft skills for business analysts is to listen [and] translate the nontechnical business needs into a more technical language.” Edmonds said his team members need to be jacks of all trades when it comes to technology, and that includes understanding the stored procedures for SQL, the .NET environment, connections to the mainframe and the desktop. Because Symetra recently parted from its parent company, the company has hired more seasoned talent rather than going for freshly minted graduates. “Symetra is a new company with a long history,” Edmonds said. “It was part of another company [before] it was spun off four years ago. We had to have people that could step in [and] do the job so we could build our sales and get a foundation out in the marketplace in an attempt to keep from going under.” But now that Symetra has established itself, Edmonds hopes to tap into younger talent in the coming years. “The advantage there is that you now have a person who has the basic skill set, the basic knowledge, and you can mold them into an application developer or a business analyst that meets the needs of your company,” he said. “You don’t have old habits to break; you don’t have new habits to make.” Even with the state of the market, Symetra hasn’t had any problems filling open positions, Edmonds said. But that’s mostly due to geography, as the organization resides near Seattle — a very high-tech locale. “We have Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and a number of other online companies,” he said. “It’s very competitive. We’ve had to pay a premium for [our employees].” After an employee is hired on at Symetra, there’s a lot of training, but not all of it is IT-intensive, as it includes some business and soft skills elements. “The development staff is encouraged to at least go and take a couple of classes so they have some business acumen around what the goals of the business are and how insurance works,” Edmonds said. “It’s pretty important that they understand that, too.” In fact, understanding the business side is essential to getting a job at Symetra. Edmonds won’t even consider a candidate who has no previous experience in the insurance realm, only because there are plenty of candidates in the area who bring this expertise to the table. “What I discount right away is somebody who has shown that they’re technically capable but [has] no experience in the insurance industry,” he said. “There are enough people with Farmers, State Farm [and] Safeco — all of them located here in Seattle with big development staffs — available to us.” Even when Symetra takes on recent graduates, there’s an expectation that they learn about the business side. “It’s different if you’re taking them right out of school,” Edmonds said. “That’s where we’ll have them take classes that’ll give them some idea — at least from a terminology standpoint — what a term product looks like, what it does for a customer, and what an income annuity is, [and] how does that work? It’s real cursory.” He also encourages his IT employees to learn from their business counterparts, thereby reinforcing the relationship between IT and the business. INTERFACE continued on page 60 November 2008 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE 55

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Certification - November 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Tech Careers Dear Techie Virtual Village Data Stream Academic Connection Troubleshooting What We Like Look Ahead The Gender Gap: IT Lacks a Woman’s Touch IT for Free: Volunteering Today Interface Technical Architect: Learning, Growing, Innovating Inside Certification Endtag Ad Index

Certification - November 2008

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