Should have left much sooner - Underwriting Specialist CNA Employee Review

3.0
Sep 24, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

IF you get the right manager, this can be a good place to work. I had a unique situation with my direct manager quitting after 4 months and (his/her) manager not really supporting the group while holding the "interim" position. The manager of our group caused more problems for our team than our competition or the softening of the market. People in other groups with better managers loved it. Just make sure you do your homework while interviewing to get a good understanding of who you will be working with at a peer level and above you. Good 401k matching.

Cons

The office was old and worn out. The desk set up of honeycomb style pods was awkward. The underwriting systems and processing systems are pretty bad. Even on an insurance standard, these were bad compared to other companies I have worked for. Trying to get certain things done, such as manuscript endorsements, is painstaking. The system for processing these endorsements are awful and the levels of approval for even the simplest of endorsements are painful. This was a big competitive disadvantage as brokers knew how slow we were to getting endorsements done. Process improvements are discussed at length but no action is taken. For example, when I started management talked about training underwriting assistants to take the back office workload off of the underwriters. Over a year later the same discussions were happening every single meeting. I took it upon myself to start training the UA's before I left. Overall this talk talk talk and no action is very commonplace unless it comes from the head of the office. Process reviews should happen more often, they could cut down on underwriters (higher salaries) by hiring more underwriting assistants (lower salaries) and having the UA's take more administrative work.

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Cons

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