Eva Mecic joined the Organizational Effectiveness team last June as a training specialist and got right to work, supporting the June UIC Human Resources All Staff meeting and developing content for the newly designed MyCareer site. More recently, she completed the first of a series of Civil Service awareness sessions. This series of training sessions will touch all Civil Service employees, and she continues to support this initiative reaching out in order to meet the needs of a variety of audiences. In addition, she is looking forward to producing custom online training for UIC processes.
She brings over a dozen years of experience in training and development; her career began in customer service, and spanned several distinct corporate environments.
“Each organization I’ve joined has had a distinct culture, and there is a wide variety across those environments, even in areas as basic as vocabulary and communication choices. While basic training principals are almost universal, I’ve found that is it not only important to tailor training to the individuals in the audience, it is also just as important to match the message to the culture of the organization.”
Most recently at Marsh, an insurance brokerage, she created customer training materials and employee training for risk management software, and ran train-the-trainer programs. Marsh was a high touch, high contact, culture and networking was key. The business was surprisingly fascinating, “Insurance was invented by the Phoenicians,” she says, “and is probably the oldest building block of modern commerce.”
Before that, she worked for GE Commercial Finance, providing performance support and training for customer service representatives and billing associates. Xerox Corporation previously owned this same organization. She joined Xerox and worked there for several years before the division was sold to GE. “Being part of a company’s training organization while major changes to the organizational culture are occurring was an exhilarating experience”; it put her in a position to help drive its success. Both Xerox and GE pursued vigorous organizational development initiatives, most were targeting quality improvement. These processes were designed to bring everyone in the organization into those processes and making change initiatives work from the bottom up.
Outside of her UIC life, Eva is a long-time resident of Chicago and enjoys museums, performances, and the many other things that Chicago offers. At home, she practices cooking, and when it is time to relax, she is on the beach outside her home. Eva attended Roosevelt University in Chicago, has a Master of Arts in degree in Training and Development and a Bachelor of Science degree in Corporate Communication.
