Life at GE : Careers : GE
The people I work with are my favorite part of my current job. On the business side of my role, Renewable Energy is a relatively new GE business with a great set of eclectic people who have been with GE for a long time and others who have just joined GE. This mix brings a fascinating combination of excitement and speed of execution balanced with rigor and data-based evaluation. I enjoy coming to the table with a diverse set of business leaders to help solve some of the biggest business issues and bringing ideas that can help drive profitability. The ITLP side of my role keeps me in touch with the most recent members of the IT talent pipeline and up to date with the latest generation's style. I love that I get to experience GE through the fresh eyes of each ITLP, intern and candidate I come into contact with. This also allows me to coach and mentor new employees by sharing my lessons learned to help guide their careers.
The people are absolutely the best thing about working at GE. There are so many smart, motivated and energetic people whom I can learn from and partner with.
ITLP brought me a wide range of experiences to prepare me for my current role as well as, I'm sure, for many in the future. I was lucky enough to do four different six-month assignments in four different businesses within GE Energy in four different locations. Diverse assignments allowed me to broaden my expertise areas immediately upon completion of college. The scope of my rotations ranged from technical database analysis to IT compliance to managing enterprise system rollouts to building an end-customer facing shopping cart application. Also, the coaching and guidance I received from leadership teams at each of the businesses still shapes my daily work today. Add to that the life-shaping experience of relocating across the world, and I have ended up with a great basis upon which to build a successful IT career.
The biggest initiative in which I had a significant scope of ownership was in GE Energy Services. The Parts ERP for that business is one of the most customized and has one of the highest transaction-volume Oracle ERP instances in the world. During a project to perform a major version upgrade on this instance, I had ownership of ensuring seamless functionality delivery for the financial modules of Oracle as well as overall ownership for the entire upgrade's cutover/go-live activities. The project had a dedicated team of nearly 20 GE employees (and involved nearly 100 other non-GE or part-time participants), a project budget of approximately $3 million, and required five full days of business outage to conduct the full cutover.
The majority of my career has involved Oracle ERP program delivery. I have developed depth in the ability to effectively partner with business contacts and technical counterparts to ensure timely and high-quality delivery of enterprise systems for a variety of functional areas, such as: finance, distribution and field services, among others. I utilize my technical problem-solving skills developed when I was a computer programmer to ensure all issues identified in programs are resolved in a logical, complete and timely fashion. I bring that logical debugging strategy not only to technical issues but also to process and communication issues, all of which are prevalent in major enterprise programs.
Ask good questions. There is no denying the mantra that "there are no bad questions," but what we don't often talk about is that there is a lot of value in asking really good questions. Leverage your knowledge to challenge the status quo, and push for people to consider how to answer the hard questions or the "controversial" questions that people ingrained in a process don't generally ask of themselves or their peers.
What's next? Check out the Global Research blog for the latest news from the lab.
View Blog