Eva Aeschlimann
But forget the rhyme. There's a reason IT specialists find Swiss Re a rewarding place to work. Eva Aeschlimann earned her degree in mathematics, and after a brief teaching stint joined Swiss Re as an applications developer. "I had seen enough classrooms," she says. This was 1989, and the applications she wrote for mainframe computers were mostly accounting-oriented.
Her engagement for the people at Swiss Re brought her to the board of the Swiss Re pension plan as a volunteer employee representative. When the need for a new, international pension plan was recognised, she switched to Human Resources for a year until the new system was up and running.
Eva returned to IT in time to join one of the first Group-wide IT projects. Expanding IT capabilities had opened the way to a new, more user-friendly generation of tools for supporting a broad range of core business functions: acquisition, marketing, relationship management... It was off to Munich for a year, where the project was developed in close cooperation with Bavarian Re, precursor of Swiss Re Germany.
Now a Senior Systems Engineer in the Technology Office, Eva is also studying part-time for a Postgraduate Diploma in Informatics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her work on Swiss Re’s web-enabled, component-oriented, 3-tier architecture ensures that Swiss Re's many IT initiatives stay on track and on the move.
"My job at Swiss Re is constantly changing, and I'm constantly learning," Eva says. "The problems are complex and changing fast. The tools we use are evolving even faster. Finding solutions with a group of talented people – that's what I really like!"
