On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we are happy to share stories of three colleagues working in our IT & Technology department. Meet Viji, Jagoda and Ewa!
Viji Bisht
Business Continuity Manager, Global Security Services
After graduating from the technical university, Viji started her career working for a technology support organization in India. Since she was the first line of support for third parties, the role involved interacting with individuals from across the globe and solving their technical issues.
After few years, she got the opportunity to start working for Hewitt Associates in Gurgaon, India and this is where the actual journey started. She spent initial few years providing technical support to internal colleagues and building good relations within the organization. This internal networking helped her to move into business continuity profile which was a bit different and more challenging than what she had been doing thus far. But then the experience gained in the previous roles helped greatly.
Viji says
“I was lucky enough to get the right guidance and good mentors in the early stages in this role. It helped me to successfully pursue my career in this domain and grow here as well.”
A couple of years back, when her husband, who also works for Aon, got an opportunity in Aon in Krakow, they trusted Aon and decided to move to Poland. Aon fully supported them while moving to Krakow. She says:
“First few months were less stressful than expected as Aon helped us a lot with some arrangements needed to settle down in Krakow comfortably”.
Working at Krakow office, Viji is managing the Business Continuity Program for critical Business Units in Krakow and other EMEA countries. In her current role, she helps the business units in developing plans to deal with any major disruptions, like floods, supply failures, outages, etc.
She says:
“One of the best parts of this role is interacting with the leadership teams from different aspects of the business and preparing the teams to manage any crisis. This provides an opportunity to learn about the organization more and network more efficiently.”
Some of the things which Viji likes about Aon is getting a better work life balance, timely guidance from seniors and ample opportunities to learn and grow.
Jagoda Wojcik
Oracle Database Administrator, TRACC (Technology Restoration and Availability Control Centre)
Jagoda joined Aon only 4 months ago and when asked about her experience so far, she says that
“it’s completely different than what I imagined an IT job in a corporate world would be.”
She is positively surprised about how rewarding and interesting her job is and how welcoming and supportive everyone in her team was to her.
Even though Jagoda describes herself as more a computer person than a people person, she really enjoys work amongst her colleagues from TRACC (Technology Restoration and Availability Control Centre) team, in which they manage availability, health and performance of Aon’s production infrastructure. In her team, Jagoda is a Technology Advanced Support Administrator, responsible for a quick incident resolution, root cause analysis and managing configuration of Oracle Database production environments.
Although she does not have a significant IT experience with only over 2 years working in the field, in her career she has been providing proactive event management, service and technology support for global retailers, travel and airlines companies, and even banks.
One of her favourite things about being a database administrator at Aon is how much variety its environments provide, since she finds here not only popular, reliable designs, but also innovative and pioneering solutions. With so many opportunities it’s quite difficult for her to get bored, which is one of the things that make this career ideal for her.
Jagoda admits that her job can get stressful when someone depends on her to immediately fix something or find a solution to a problem. She comments:
“My way of dealing with stressful situations is to be confident in my skills and to remember advice I was once given: that it is OK to ask for help. This gives me some peace of mind and so far has always allowed me to resolve the issue I was presented with”.
Ewa Szulik-Stach
Jr IT Project Manager, Business Technology Solutions
When you ask Ewa what is the most interesting in her role, she would definitely say that as a project manager you will never get bored. Literally speaking, you will never have “a typical day with 10:00 a.m. break for coffee”. At Aon we deliver various IT projects and work with people, both technical and non-technical, from different countries and in various time zones. She admits that delivering IT projects in such international environment is very challenging. But that’s what makes project management so interesting here.
Ewa started her adventure at Aon almost 10 years ago. She started as a Project Office Analyst, then moved to a Finance Analyst role and has finally ended up delivering IT projects in Business Technology Solutions team. Ewa says:
“Aon is definitely a great place to work since it offers many opportunities, flexible working hours and remote work. What is more, Aon fully supported me when I was on the maternity leaves and enabled smooth return to a project manager role”.
She admits that as a full-time working mom of two, such supportive corporate environment makes her life much easier.
90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent communicating. Managing projects, she needs to effectively convey vision, ideas, goals, and issues—as well as produce reports and presentations, among other things. She believes that being a great communicator is a one of the key skills every project manager should have.
One more thing, when delivering IT projects it is really important to never lose your good sense of humour. That is often needed when things get tense and the workload seems impossible! In a project manager role tough times happen pretty often.
