Erie Insurance Field Trip 2024

On Thursday, March 14th the AM and PM Computer Programming classes took a field trip to Erie Insurance. This field trip was originally pushed by Eric Bach (Master Solutions Engineer at EI) back in 2022 and it had finally come to fruition!

I had been working with the very helpful Sheila Silva (IT Supervisor / Talent Optimization Management) since late 2023 to organize the trip, and she put together a wonderful experience for the students (as well as for me, Mrs. Brown, Ms. Plummer, and Director LaVerde).

The trip started out with us getting off the bus at the beautiful Thomas Hagan Building.

Image sourced from here: https://www.albertkahn.com/projects/erie-insurance—thomas-hagen-building

We were immediately greeted by Sheila, as well as several very friendly and helpful staff of the Erie Insurance HR team to help us register our visit and then begin the tour.

The tour was AMAZING and I think it completely changed the perspective many students had for working in IT, specifically for a company such as Erie Insurance, which may not sound “fun” at first thought. Many students were excited by the idea that such an impressive facility was located in Erie and they were already talking about how they now wanted to eventually find a way to earn a career with the company. The ERIE campus is huge so there’s no way a tour could show us everything, but what we saw was great. We were shown parts of their training program in the Hagan building and then shown areas in the main building including the cafeteria, mailing areas, employee fitness area and much more. The tour of the facility concluded at ERIE’s “Event Center at the Firehouse”, which was also absolutely beautiful.

At the Firehouse, we were treated to two excellent presentations. First, we had a presentation from 3 analysts from 3 different areas of the role to learn all about how their roles work, what goes into being an analyst, and how their role fits into the Software Development Life Cycle. They talked about how they gathered requirements and user stories (“As a…., I want…., So that….”) and acceptance criteria, the importance of communication and collaboration, and several types of testing (eg. unit testing, acceptance testing, regression testing).

The analysts also talked about how they got into the roles. It seemed common for employees to try several roles within ERIE until they find the perfect fit, which sounds like just another perk to finding a position within the company (there is a lot of room for growth). The analyst presentation concluded with a fun hands-on group activity where one student from each group played the role of the project owner and the rest of the group worked to help define the requirements for the PO’s perfect sandwich.

Students listening to presentation from 2 master engineers at Erie Insurance

The second presentation was from two master software engineers. They talked about the variety of engineering roles within the company, and the different levels (intern, associate, professional, senior, staff, master). They also talked about the SDLC and how agile development (as opposed to waterfall) is the modern approach to development. They also shared several demographics for the engineers at the company (as much as 20% were self-taught) and requirements to be considered for an engineering role in the company (4 year degree, 2 year degree, experience/certifications, etc). When asked about languages the company uses, they listed a ton and said it was really dependent on the need of the application being developed. They also said, with respect to learning a language, that it’s less about any specific language and more about understanding the concepts (they stressed Object Oriented Programming and Functional Programming). When asked what we could do to improve the chances of our seniors/graduates to be considered for an opportunity with the company, Sheila chimed in and said she’s been looking for individuals who have AWS certifications. Specifically, for entry level, she mentioned the “Certified Cloud Practitioner” cert. She also mentioned it would be nice to see people familiar with Mendix.

After the presentations, we were treated to lunch from Moe’s. The students loved the food and it was a nice opportunity to socialize and talk about the experience and possible opportunities in the future.

Once lunch concluded, we were given a hands-on activity with Joseph Porter (Sr. IT Business Support) where we were given some insight into the insurance experience. Much of this activity was protected so I’ll leave it at that, but I think we all enjoyed it.

Overall, this was a great experience. I’m extremely thankful to Sheila, Eric, Joseph, the analysts, and the software engineers for contributing their time and effort to share their insights and experiences with the students; and I’m thankful the Erie Insurance as a company for allowing it to occur and their generosity in the day.