What I’m Doing Here – July 18, 2010

Since I was asked, I’ll explain a little about why I’m here and the work I’m doing.

I am here on a short-term assignment with LMG Insurance Thailand. (LMG stands for “Liberty Mutual Group.” LMG Insurance Thailand company is one of our international companies.)

My assignment has three main goals:

1. To develop a training curriculum for two positions – the Claims field adjuster (the person who goes out to the scene of an accident and gathers the data) and the Claims analyst (the person who reviews the claim and determines what is covered by the insurance policy and what LMG will pay the customer).
2. To identify training needs for the middle managers
3. To develop a training road map for LMG Thailand – the different types of employee training to deliver, how and when, vendors to work with, etc. I’m not creating all of this – just laying out a strategy for how they might go about it.
   

At the moment, I’m concentrating on item #3. As a start, I am meeting with local companies in Bangkok to learn about their training methods and best practices. (The senior management here in LMG Insurance is helping with this – they are calling their contacts in various industries to get me in the door.) In particular, I’m meeting with large, multi-national companies here, because one of the challenges is to ensure that our training approach will be successful for Thai employees. It would be easy enough to just bring our US training practices and try to implement them here, but that would likely be unsuccessful. Thai employees are very different from American employees and we need to do this in a way that will be respectful of cultural differences.

So, yes, I am doing actual work – not just travelling around, seeing the sights, and eating good food!