Towers Watson Application Essay

In my position as a pension benefit specialist with Towers Watson, I have gained invaluable experience working with plan administrators to process participant request, address inquiries, and resolve disputes. Through this experience I have learned a great deal about pension law, pension plan design, processes, and policies. This experience has allowed me to exercise my skills in time management in adhering to client service level agreements to ensure participant’s request are handled in a timely fashion. In addition have had the chance to hone my research and analytical skills in reviewing and relaying retirement plan information to participants.

As a help desk analyst with Bank of America, I provided technical support to internal customers located throughout the world. In this capacity I learned the importance of recognizing and respecting cultural differences. This helped in

overcoming an assortment of barriers related to customs or practices observed in cultures outside of my own. This experience also helped to make me mindful of details such as time zones to ensure that request were processed accordingly and responses, such as phone calls, were placed at a respectable hour per banker’s location.
As a pension benefit specialist for Towers Watson I worked daily with teams members that are located throughout the United States As a result of my strong organizational, leadership, and interpersonal skills I was promoted to client lead.

In this capacity I serve as a liaison between my local tem members, administration teams, and management. This includes coordinating schedules, delegating tasks, and monitoring workflows.

Some of my key strength’s in dealing with others include my ability to teach others, deescalate situations by recognizing and acknowledging the perspectives of others, and my willingness to be of assistance.

As a client lead whose project team are constantly changing it is imperative that my team learns quickly and understands the details of project and retirement plans. To reinforce the information learned in training, I use the client knowledge base to design weekly crossword puzzles for my team. This assist me with retaining details and serves to ensure that my team is learning not only the information, but how to conduct research by navigating available

resources.
As a client lead, my responsibilities include handling supervisor requests and coaching fellow pension specialist on techniques to use to de-escalate a given situation. Through these coaching session and application of these techniques the escalation rate in our office has been reduced by 30% so far this year. My skills in this area have proven so effective that I lead the new hire de-escalation trainings for two classes hired in August of 2015.
My willingness to help others has made me an asset to my colleagues, direct reports, managers and participants. Whether the issue involves ensuring overnight delivery to a participant to comply with deadline restrictions, running reports to identify trends to be presented by management to the client, or assisting a benefit specialist with locating process information, I am there to help. By recognizing the importance of every step in the process I know that no job is too big or too small and should always be addressed professionally, accurately, and timely.

I am currently in the process of obtaining my designation as a Certified Employee Benefits Specialist. I am scheduled to take the test for the first set of courses, Retirement Plan design on September 30, 2015. I am also already enrolled for the second stage Retirement Plan Management beginning in October 2015.