Having earned a degree in business administration in the 1970s with no idea whatsoever of what I wanted to do, I took a job in commercial finance that led to a regional position for a mortgage banker packaging loan commitments for sale on the secondary market.
Then came the 1980s and the market crash. I was out of a job. Needing a paycheck – any paycheck – I went to work shuffling papers for the president of a landscaping division of a large facilities services company.
No one in the landscape home office wanted to handle the workers’ compensation claims, so I inherited them.
Successful management of the claims brought me to the attention of the parent company loss control manager. When one of his employees enlisted in the Army, he had me transferred to his department. After a few months, he figured out that he could send me to school to learn the safety business and then delegate to me a great deal of his tasks. That left him time to play golf. We oversaw commercial janitorial, commercial landscaping, a PEO that worked exclusively with a national bakery, energy services, a string of laboratories that did water quality testing, elevator maintenance operations – and, oh yeah, the slightly risky operations of theme park ride maintenance. It was quite the education.
Once again, I came to the attention of another manager, this time the corporate risk manager. I was tapped to learn analytics and forecasting, ending up as the risk analyst. My duties continued to expand to where ultimately I’ve landed as the director of corporate risk and compliance with responsibility for EHS at a large non-profit with more risk exposure than you’d think. People “donate” the darnedest things to us – the most interesting being a portable X-ray machine found at a donation site one morning upon the manager arriving to open for business.
All the prior training certainly comes in handy. It has been a wonderful experience with learning something new all the time. It is a privilege to each night send home my colleagues in the same condition in which I received them.
Janine Bain
Director, corporate risk and compliance
St. Petersburg, FL
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