[Management] Interview with Oh Min, Executive Vice President of OrangeLife Insurance, Shinhan Financial Group
- Date2020.04.02
- 5540
The Ewha DNA series of interviews introduces esteemed Ewha alumnae from various fields. Today, Oh Min, who graduated in Statistics in 1997 and has recently been promoted to Executive Vice President of OrangeLife Insurance of Shinhan Financial Group, talks about strategy, HR, and career development.
Q. Nice to meet you. Would you introduce yourself?
I am Oh Min. I graduated in Statistics and the class of 1992. Now I am directing the Agile management support department at OrangeLife Insurance, a life insurance company within Shinhan Financial Group. The department is responsible for implementing adjustment affairs of corporate strategy and HR (management and education of human resources).
Q. What motivated you to choose the job?
Now I am in charge of strategy and HR, but the major background of my past career is strategy. Starting from strategic planning at a communications IT company, I worked in strategy consulting at a global management consulting company and moved to a global IT corporation. At OrangeLife, where I am working now, I started working at the strategy department at first.
If you major in Statistics, you have many choices to work for various jobs in various industries. Strategy consulting of my choice places high importance on the decision-making process based on logical development, facts, and numbers; in other words, statistical thinking is highly required. I also minored in Business Administration and that means I studied both liberal arts and sciences, and that was greatly helpful for doing my job.
Q. What essential qualifications do you think financiers should have?
Finance is an area of expertise, which means it requires people to have a high level of expertise for specific areas such as bank, card, insurance, and asset management. If you want to work in finance, you need to decide which area you want to work in before acquiring professional skills concerned. One of the important professional skills for insurance is actuarial science, and many actuaries are people who majored in Mathematics, Statistics, and Insurance.
With regard to essential qualifications for a financier working across the financial area, I want to talk about a slightly abstract qualification, “understanding customers.” Eventually, corporations cannot survive without customers’ choice. In this era of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, existing financial companies have been greatly challenged by fintech companies. We should place customers at the center. Providing excellent customer experience at the point of contact between customer and company is very important for existing financial companies to continue to grow and survive in the future, and the ability to make this come true is the essential qualification.
Q. I wonder about the course of your career path. How have you developed a career until you were promoted to an executive?
I have led various projects and initiatives in the field to make my CV full of relevant experiences. If you lead a project or an initiative, you need to work more and communicate with different departments, and this sometimes causes conflicts. Furthermore, most people do not want to be a leader since they are not paid more even if they do hard work. In addition, you do not always succeed, and the risk of failure is high. However, I did not fear failure. I knew how I could reduce the risk of failure: "Make more people within the organization participate through diligent communication and coordination." This is how you minimize risks.
Q. I wonder how the experience and learning in Statistics at Ewha helped your career.
The experience and learning in Statistics were greatly helpful for logical thinking and the data-based decision-making process. When I am working, I tend to ask “why" about many things. Some might think that the answer in statistics and mathematics is the only one, and the best virtue is finding the answer quickly. However, if you see the subjects as "process," they focus on "why." I believe that the reason I can see things from a new point of view by asking why, not just accepting those the way they are, even when doing my job, is attributable to my major. I was also able to build the ability not to blindly believe in numbers since I understood that numbers could distort some facts.
Q. What do you think Ewha DNA is?
I think it is liveliness and confidence. When you are equipped with "ability," in addition to liveliness and confidence, they become great advantages for you. If you are equipped with the ability and do not lose Ewha DNA, you will be an outstanding talent in the organization where you want to work!
- Source: Ewha Today