Insurance Fraud is Costing YOU Money...So Deal With It

The insurance industry is quite magnificent when you think about it. You pay lots of money in premiums each year to make sure that your home, your car, your job, and your life are protected. Then, sometimes things happen and sometimes they don’t. You can probably imagine the millions of factors that must be taken into consideration when creating an insurance policy. The complexity involved in figuring out exactly how much each person has to pay just in case something happens is ridiculous. And with any system that relies upon the policy of “utmost good faith” when reporting claims, there is also a great deal of fraud.

If you find, as I have, that you have in interest in the insurance market, you should consider working for a consulting firm that handles insurance fraud. In essence, a consulting firm will work with an insurance company to figure out whether or not an actual claim exists and what the true amount of the claim should be. A firm can have any number of possible specializations within the industry, such as healthcare, worker’s comp, property & casualty, auto or just insurance in general. So find your niche in this industry or another. Working for one of these firms would not only be a pretty sweet job, but you’ll be doing a greater good as well: catching cheaters keep insurance premiums down for the rest of us!

According to the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, insurance fraud costs Americans $80 billion each year. Crime rings deliberately stage large schemes to collect bogus claims from insurance companies and people like you and me lie on our auto insurance application saying we always wear our seat belts and drive only 8,000 miles per year. The truth is, sometimes I forget to wear my seat belt and road-trips to Mardi Gras certainly tack on to my yearly mileage. Don't worry, I didn't really lie, but other people do it. Some have even faked the death of a loved one to collect on life insurance policies. Pathetic, huh? Well do something about it, work for a consulting company that helps stop insurance fraud.

Internship Opportunities!

By now, hopefully you have started looking for an internship for this summer. For business school kids, many on-campus recruiters have likely already come and gone for the positions they have available this summer. However, there are many other companies that recruit during March and April once they know what their hiring needs are. So, check out Experience and keep your ears open for opportunities that professors and your career center are promoting.

I want to take this opportunity to let you know about an amazing internship program that Experience is offering through its partnership with New Sector Alliance. Especially if you are a sophomore interested in “breaking in” to the industry, this is a great way to get your feet wet! Experience will sponsor ten sophomores in a strategic initiative project with a Boston-area non-profit. Each intern will also have a mentor from a top management consulting firm, which is an amazing way to network and foster relationships with professionals that can hook you up with a real job (hopefully). The application deadline is Thursday, so apply!

Another way to search for internships is just by talking to people. Don’t be shy! Your professors, parents, deans, and friends know a lot of people that you don’t. By expressing your interests and goals to the people around you, you will find that alumni and other contacts want to help you out. They can put you in touch with the right people and you might be given an opportunity you never would have dreamed of.

I’m going to come right out and admit it; sometimes networking is pretty awkward and you don’t want to cold call a random alum. But, don’t be jealous when someone else gets the job you wanted because they had enough guts to do it. Trust me, it happens. When people tell you “It’s all about who you know”, don’t be fooled…IT’S TRUE!

Who Needs Some Consulting?

In searching for a source of inspiration for today’s entry, I looked to the oh-so-interesting happenings reported in the Wall Street Journal this week. Let’s see, there was Hewlett-Packard’s rising profit, Google trying to enter the television industry and Fannie Mae not paying $44.4 million in bonuses. HP and Google, they're doing pretty well, so we'll leave them alone. As for Fannie Mae, been there, done that (they were my client this summer). Then I came across an article about the increasingly popular airline JetBlue. Their flights from Richmond to Boston are less than $100 for a round trip ticket…it's no wonder they are growing like crazy.

In reading the article I thought, I would be a little bit angry if I had to sit on the runway for more than an hour or two, never mind the ten hours that passengers had to deal with last week. Not only that, but more than 1,000 JetBlue flights were cancelled. Perhaps this is a company that needs some consulting and for all I know, they already have consultants working with them. Consulting firms are dying to get their hands on clients like JetBlue that are experiencing rapid growth and have rising profits to spend on professionals who can help manage this growth. So what is the point of this entry and how does it tie into my whole interviewing theme for the week?

Well, as difficult as it is to make it through a whole issue of the Wall Street Journal each day, you need to know your current events. Before an interview, be sure to pick out at least five things going on in the news that you could talk about in your interview. Knowing what is going on in the economy is the best way for you to show your interest in business and specifically, what areas you think a consulting firm could grow. An interviewer may ask you about something you’ve heard about in the news, but if they don’t, it is perfectly acceptable to work it into an interview question. Of course, don’t sound like a know-it-all, but a firm will be impressed if you can hold an intelligent conversation about a current event.

Here are some great sites for business news:

Wall Street Journal
CNN Business News
Smart Money

The "I" Word

I have decided to dedicate this week’s blog entries to relaying my personal experiences with the "I" word. You all know and love a little thing we like to call interviewing. I don’t know about you, but I remember how scared I was for my first interview and being stumped by relatively simple-sounding questions like "Tell me about yourself." I would sit there and think, "Well, what do they want to know? That I have a brother and an African gray parrot that talks, or that I’m a finance and accounting major who really wants this job?" Man, this is a tough one. Then you sit thinking about it for a minute while the interviewer is thinking, "this person can’t even think of something to tell me about herself? That’s sad."

Consulting interviews can be particularly difficult because interviewers try hard to give you questions that make you think, trick you, or place you in real life job situations. Here are a couple of questions I have gotten during various consulting interviews that made me think and wish I had prepared for:

1. Tell me about a time when you were creative.
2. Why is a manhole cover round?

Any version of the "tell me about a time when" question can be pretty obscure but it is always good to have about five or six experiences in your head that could be molded to answer any question. Use your extracurricular activities and work in the classroom to your advantage!
And the manhole question, well that’s just weird and of course I got it wrong. The interviewer told me that they just want to see if you can reason through trick questions. It’s not necessarily important that you get the answer right, but that your thought process in reaching the answer is sound. By the way, the answer is, so that it can be rolled from one manhole to another or so that it will never fall through the hole. Who knew?

Do your research on the types of interview questions you will get! Here are some great sources:

Campus Access

Job Employment Guide

Do You Like To Travel?

The clients of consulting companies can be as close to the same building as your home office to halfway across the world. So, if you are looking into consulting, the possibility of travel is pretty good. Though a consulting company may have an office closer to the client, that office may not have the expertise or people needed to complete the job. That's when people from other offices are brought in, so you could be working with people you have never met before (which is why you need to be a people person). However, just because some employees will travel, that doesn't mean that YOU have to. Some consulting firms are good about taking personal preferences into consideration. So if you just can't live without your boyfriend or girlfriend for an entire week or really hate flying, you may be in luck. But, some firms really don't care if you want to travel or not, it's part of the job.

Thus, when interviewing for consulting jobs, make sure you ask questions about travel opportunities and frequency. Firms will also come right out and ask if you are willing to travel, so be honest. If you really would like to be close to one city all the time, you probably will be unhappy if you say yes just so you can get the job. They are serious when they ask this question and you may find yourself in the middle of Iowa or worse. Not that Iowa is bad, but I've never been there so who knows.

Here are some good questions to ask that will give you a feel for what the travel may (or may not) entail:

• Where are the majority your clients located?
• How long is the typical assignment?
• Does everyone have to travel?
• Is personal preference taken into consideration?
• What percent of the year is typically spent on out-of-town clients?

While you probably won't be assigned to a client in Hawaii or London your first week on the job, you may get to go to some cool places (I spent a week in New York City this summer and a weekend in Orlando) and some awfully bad places which I've yet to experience.

Sarbanes-Oxley Gives Rise to Consulting Jobs

After the catastrophes of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the like, regulation has tightened. Most times we think more rules means more money and this case is no different. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002, has given rise to a great deal of consulting work due to the stringent requirements it places on companies in dealing with their financial statements. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but this extra money spent to implement the standards is going right into the hands of consulting companies.

Those of you interested in bridal consulting may not enjoy this type of work, but if you have an accounting background and are not interested in audit or tax, this could be a great fit. It is certainly something I considered during my job search. Why? Because this law is MANDATORY for public companies. Though a company could try to establish internal controls and meet all of the specifications using their own employees, it would likely be more expensive and they wouldn’t do as good of a job. And who wants to be the next Ken Lay? Not me.

So, they’re hiring outsiders, many of which work for consulting practices that have been spun off from large accounting practices or otherwise. This is because Sarbanes-Oxley also requires additional auditor independence. Auditors can no longer help the firm with its internal controls and then check those controls during the audit. The tasks must now be separate. This means more people are needed since the work has essentially doubled.

Bottom line #1, this is another opportunity for you to explore a different area of consulting. Bottom line #2, regulation is good…for consulting firms at least.

Bridal Consulting Sounds Nice

So, apparently there are lots of different kinds of consultants out there. I have so narrowly, so it seems, focused my efforts on business consulting and specifically, the financial services industry. However, upon doing some research, there are lots of other consulting careers I could see myself trying out.


Bridal consulting, now that's a good one. Not that I've ever been married or will be getting married anytime soon, but I think I would be good at planning a wedding. And I wouldn't just be a wedding planner, I'd be a bridal consultant, which sounds much more sophisticated, doesn't it? But, I don't know much about weddings, so consulting about them may not be the best idea. A good idea though, would be to look into consulting practices in areas that you DO know about.

Consulting practices range from the large, national practices like Accenture, Deloitte Consulting and Bearing Point to ones outside of the business world, like athletic, spiritual, you-name-it consultants. Because I have so wisely chosen the business route, or actually, that's just what I'm interested in, I will likely focus more on that. But bridal consulting would be really cool...and I secretly wish I could try it out, even just for a day.

Consulting.com is a great way to learn more about all things consulting, so check it out.

Anything for Money

Anything for money. That's what they told me on my first day of work this summer. It was a joke of course, but it gave me an interesting first glimpse into the field of consulting. I thought, that's kind of weird and what do they mean by ANYTHING. It turns out that firms turn to consulting companies for projects that they don't have the man power or expertise to handle internally. The variety of projects can range from revamping an entire business process over two years or just two weeks worth of sorting out an information disaster. Consulting firms have an array of skill sets available to them and will use their people with the best fit for the project to make the most amount of money.

Like most work environments, consulting is all about working in teams, so if you don't like people, you're probably in trouble. Of course you don't like some people; that person that's always asking 500 million questions and you want to tell to quiet down, or the girl that thinks she's a know-it-all, but, generally, not letting it interfere with your work day is a must. The same etiquette as working at any professional services firm applies. Likely, you already know what you're getting yourself into, if not click on the link above. With that said, let me tell you how my internship this summer fits into consulting.

The actual name of the practice I interned in is Financial Services Advisory. Officially and emphatically, not financial services consulting because we advise, not consult...what's the difference? I worked on a large government sponsored entity this summer in order to help them account for mortgage backed securities. Due to non-disclosure agreements, I can't disclose the extent of what I was doing, but the best part about the project was that it was always changing and you could see the progress every day. This is something particularly important to me, because sitting around spinning your wheels, well, that's just boring. I was given a great deal of responsibility, some of which I definitely didn't trust myself to have as an intern, but it helped me to learn more about the mortgage industry and business in general.

So while the saying anything for money may hold true, the projects are meaningful and the money is passed on to the professionals. While I'm not about to publicize my salary over the World Wide Web, you can make money in this field, especially if you are outgoing and a hard worker that can bring in business for a firm. So go out and earn that cash!