A Fresh Perspective on Millennials

Written by: Becky Abel, Allstate SIU

My experience with the millennial generation:

Little did I know when I elected to attend a session at one of the fraud conferences in 2017, that I would have had a very different perspective than my industry partners.

I took my seat in the front row, ready to listen to the panel discussion and found myself compelled to speak voicing a different perspective. The general feeling of the audience seemed to be one of perplexed on how to optimize the skills of Millennials.  I, on the other hand thought the skill sets of Millennials could be of great value to the fraud investigations environment.

At Allstate, like many other companies, we have a summer intern program.
Who better to develop the foundation of a Social Media team, but a Millennial. I knew we had only a few months before our intern returned to school for his senior year at Virginia Tech and I wanted it to be meaningful for him and Allstate. So upon his arrival, a project plan was developed and he really ran the entire project.

He was on planes going to key points across the country understanding the dynamics of our business, spending time interviewing investigators and identifying vendors for consideration. He developed the proposal for the entire program, presented to several audiences including Officer level and created the test environment. He did all of this in a matter of a few months successfully.

Additionally, our entire SIU Analytics team are all Millennials.
I love their perspective, because it always involves developing solutions.  No excuses to challenges, just the opposite they embrace them.

So when we wonder the capabilities of Millennials, they are vast.