Vantaggi
Progressive hires fun, hard working, knowledgeable people to complete a relatively challenging but unrewarding job. Claims is the contract fulfillment side of insurance which can be a little messy, but that is what makes the job challenging. Customers tend to have a minimal understanding of the product they purchased often only making the purchase due to state law, so it is our job in claims to help them resolve their problems while teaching them how the contract they purchased works all while making sure that once everything is resolved they will have an experience that they will positively talk to their friends about. This sort of challenge makes it so that even many years into the job you are still encountering new questions and situations that you have to solve which keeps things interesting. I have met many Progressive employees from across the country over the years and they all have a very similar positive and solutions oriented attitude which really makes for a great environment. This was not always this way, but in recent years has really trended towards the positive. Training is heavy early in the career and drops off significantly thereafter. It is very job specific and done in house. Progressive does not use outside certifications (e.g. I-Car) in their training, but will value them in hiring interviews if they have already been received. Compensation package is pretty standard for the industry. I have no desire to leave for another company for a minimal raise as it will be essentially the same issues in every company. Progressive is always thinking of the marketplace for insurance and how they can grow their piece of the pie and fend off competitors. Snapshot is a great innovation and gives Progressive a significant advantage over competitors. The service center model is also a competitive advantage both on the customer side and workforce co-location.
Svantaggi
Work-life balance has improved quite a bit over the years, but expect to work over 40 hours a week. This is an improvement over the 48-50 hour weeks of a few years ago, but not much. Only California and a few claims jobs in other states offers overtime pay for work over 40 hours for non leadership claims positions, so keep that in mind. Career advancement is very stagnant. Once you get to a 39 level job there is not much opportunity. There have been a couple reductions in force over the years which have made the organization much more flat for completely understandable market economic reasons, however this significantly reduces higher level career paths. People that are already in management positions will likely be there until retirement and it is unlikely there will be a significant enough amount of growth to require creation of other management positions. Even if there were to be a good amount of growth, most of the jobs from it would likely be funneled into the central claims operation which would require moving and leaving family and friends behind. It's disheartening to know that one can be at the top of their career after only a few years. There is little to no opportunity to pivot from claims to any other parts of the organization. Most of the non claims jobs are centralized in a few locations around the country with a majority being in Cleveland at the HQ. There are basically no perks. A third party vendor is used to manage 'work perks' and they are terrible. Also, trying to speak with someone outside the industry about what you do is conversational death. The general population has a stigma against anything insurance. I am not am not ashamed but definitely not proud of what I do for a living and that weighs on me very heavily. The technology used in claims is woefully inadequate. While Progressive spends a good amount of money on IT infrastructure for the analytics, data, and sales components of the business, claims technology tends to be an afterthought. We work with a byzantine patchwork of programs that have been haphazardly introduced and maintained over the years. First party CMS, third party CMS, Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, Outlook, and countless websites bookmarked by trial and error over the years are what are used to accomplish day to day operations and manage career documentation. The career development Sharepoint site has not been updated in what seems like 4 years despite constant assurances that it is right around the corner. PDS continues to be bad, but it will eventually get better. One final example of the pathetic state of technology was the transition to Windows 7 took place about 2 months before support for XP was going to be shut down by Microsoft, and likely due to the shutdown.