Vanessa Morton only joined her family brokerage, Gary Morton Insurance Brokers, as an Account Manager in June after nine years at Allianz. In that time, she's grown her business portfolio, overseen a company rebranding, created and launched their new website and led them into the paperless society. Not bad for someone who had work/life balance challenges as recently as last year.
Morton began her career in insurance at Allianz after joining their graduate program in 2002. Those were wonderful years that she looks back on with great fondness, but there were times, she admits, when her work commitments became almost all-consuming - a common theme in the career of many Young Professionals (YPs).
Luckily, she was able to benefit from the fruit of her own labours by enrolling on NIBA College’s Mentoring Program – an initiative that Morton herself proposed after hearing of the success of a similar program at the Sydney's University of Technology, and subsequently put into action through her work on the NSW Young Professionals' Committee.
In the three years the program has been running, dozens of YPs have been able to harness the experience and advice of industry leaders to help them refocus and find inspiration. For Morton, the timing of her own involvement couldn’t have been better. "My mentor was Graham Cassidy, the Marketing Relationship Manager at Steadfast," she says. "I needed to find someone who would help me rebalance my priorities.
"Graham is highly productive, he achieves a lot and he’s a fantastic leader, but at the same time I saw him as being someone who exercises three times a week and spend time with his kids and family. I specifically wanted to work with him because I wanted to learn how he achieved that balance."
With Cassidy's help, Morton’s workplace productivity soared. She was able to reintroduce regular exercise and hobbies back into her life. Now, after her long-planned transition from the 3,000-strong Allianz staff to the family brokerage's team of five, the rebalance is complete. Better yet, Morton was able to see firsthand how valuable the mentoring program she helped set up really is.
As success stories go, the mentoring program takes some beating. But the NSW YP Committee remains ambitious and is already putting plans in place to strengthen links between the state committees across Australia. Victoria has already staged two successful mentoring programs of its own, with other states looking to follow suit. And it's the sharing of ideas and best practice that Morton and her fellows in NSW are so keen to promote.
"It's great to see some of the other committees getting value out of the things we're doing," she says. "We're quite happy to hand over our templates and the structure we have in place in order for them to be able to implement it in their own states."
To that end, Morton would like to see the establishment of an online central repository, where committee minutes, structures and programs from all the YP Committees can be stored and accessed for the greater good. With NIBA support, this is likely to go ahead in the coming months.
Safeguarding the industry
Looking further ahead, Morton and her fellow committee members are eager to tackle the wider problem of making the insurance industry a more attractive proposition to school leavers and graduates. Good work is already being done, she says, but there's more to achieve in this area.
Establishing closer links with schools' career advisers and accessing career fairs with a standard presentation that shows the power and value of the insurance profession is top of Morton’s wish list.
"With the help of local brokers we’ll be able to have a presence at careers fairs and we aim to establish a standard presentation, which will be NIBA endorsed, hopefully with a fantastic video that illustrates that we do rebuild people's lives when the worst happens and we do make a difference in the community. I think that would help people want to look into insurance as a profession."
Any school leaver or graduate need only spend some time with Morton herself to see that a career in insurance can be rewarding indeed. "I love the variety, and that everyday is different," she says. "But for me, what I most like is that although insurance is just a very small piece of the puzzle in a business's day-to-day operations, it's such an important part. Just looking at how we can help people get back on their feet after they’ve had the worst thing happen is a really satisfying part of my job."
It’s this aspect of making things happen – evident in her committee work – that Morton really enjoys, and seeing her behind-the-scenes work paying off is always a motivating factor. She provided the public liability insurance for the design support for the Windwatcher art installation in Sydney's Central Park residential development. The artwork, by Mikala Dwyer, was delivered by specialist engineering firm Event Engineering and was project managed by Morton’s client Trent Baker of Armature Design Support.
Today, in the shadow of the Windwatcher itself, the power and worth of insurance is entirely evident. "I look at it [the Windwatcher] and think that without me being involved in making sure the client has the right insurance cover, fantastic things like that can't happen," says Morton. "It's so rewarding to see the final product of what we do."
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