Employee in the Spotlight: Meet Erna, a Principal Director who leads with logic and heart

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Erna Hordijk and I am 50 years old. I live in a small village in the South of the Netherlands with my husband, my daughter (14), and my son (12). I studied Information Services and Information Management because I dreamed of working in a library.

After my studies, I started working at a small company that had developed an administration system for life insurance and pensions. My first real external project was in Brussels. It was a great time, and I still keep in touch with colleagues from that period. I left the company because one of the colleagues became my partner (and still is). After that, I worked for many years on the specifications to implement life and pensions administration systems.

Besides working, I enjoy reading fiction books and all kinds of other information, attending my children's sports competitions, and spending time with friends and family.

What drew you to IG&H?

Actually, it was not my own decision, but the company I was working at was taken over by IG&H about five years ago. When I entered IG&H, I felt the spirit of all the young people working there. It was a nice spirit, although I found myself a bit 'old' compared to other IG&H colleagues! On one of the first days, I was among a mix of all kinds of people who were also just starting at IG&H. Colleagues from our office in Portugal were there for the first time, my own colleagues and people from another partner. Together, we dove directly into the content because of a proof of concept we were invited to do by a prospect. And we won! And - with some other directions in between - we are really developing and implementing that pension administration software.

What is your role & what does it involve?

Currently, I am a Principal Director within the Business Engineering (BE) team and one of the team leads of BE Pensions. I am responsible for our Model-Based Engineering & Master Design approach from a capability perspective. Also, I am one of the functional leads of our standard software for pension administration, AllVida.

In my current role, I develop the capabilities from functional analyses and functional design and guide our people in the growth of their capabilities from content and skill perspectives. However, I also do 'content' myself, by sketching the functional outlines of the new backend applications, diving into all kinds of details, and creating functional analyses and functional software designs. So, the guidance is really from a content perspective because knowledge transfer for this kind of role is most effective when working closely together.

Besides the delivery aspect as a team leader, the development of our team and coaching colleagues in their personal and professional development also fall into my realm of responsibilities. I try to do all of this in three days a week, but as you understand, that is a big challenge 😉.

What does a typical day at IG&H look like?

Not sure if there is a typical day. But most of the time, I start by inspecting my agenda and reading my emails, preparing meetings if necessary. Also, I have daily check-ins from projects and solution perspectives. After check-ins, there are usually meetings to look at analyses or discuss functional design challenges, I talk to Product Owners, analysts or technical architects about the best solution for our challenges or about planning.

There are days when I don't have a lot of time to work out content myself, but on a lucky day, I find myself really having some focus time, diving into the content, working out solutions and checking things. Focus time is important because functional analysis needs attention for the right quality, just as functional design demands time to think over solutions. It is not black and white, but sometimes you make big steps forward and sometimes you need to go back because you found something that doesn't fit the pattern.

So, a typical day is a crazy day with a lot of meetings to attend and emails or chats to answer, but the most productive days are when I have time to focus.

What do you enjoy most about working at IG&H?

I truly enjoy the freedom to do my job as I think it is done best. I love the fact that we have a lot of young, smart, and eager colleagues, which brings a specific energy to the company. I also really enjoy working with our tech dev colleagues to realize the application.

Furthermore, I am thankful to be given the opportunity to lead a team of people from a content perspective, without looking at the fact that I am a part-time working woman (which in the end doesn't say anything about my desire to deliver value to our clients). I feel appreciated by that opportunity.

What has been your proudest moment at IG&H?

What I am most proud of is my BE team. We have a lot of enthusiastic and smart people. They make things happen; I am nothing on my own. I am also proud of their perseverance to go through very challenging periods, looking at the new Pension legislation and the transformations IG&H goes through. When I take some distance to look at myself, I feel proud that I succeeded in guiding our people and realizing our model-based engineering-related software applications. I'm proud that our dream has turned into reality!

What do you like most about your role?

The freedom in my job and creating innovative solutions. For outsiders, the approach might seem too complicated, but I really believe in our model-based engineering approach. In a nutshell, it gives us the opportunity to apply domain-driven design by using domain models for specification and using this within software patterns, all to create working applications. It is a challenging approach that demands balancing between perfect modelling and being practical. Seeing the solutions I believe in materialize into something real, even just in small steps, energizes me. With these small steps, we build on bringing even more value to our clients than creating new functionalities.

To realize this, we need to combine conceptual skills with detailed knowledge, but also with a practical and realistic way of working. What I like most is discussing those challenging topics with my technical and business engineering colleagues and making sure these ideas come to life.

What is your advice to other women looking to pursue a career in tech?

I have been working in ‘tech’ so to speak since the start of my career, and I think I am very lucky that I have never experienced issues with being a woman among a lot of men. In my first job, we had maybe a few more men, but also women. So for me personally, it has never been an issue. Maybe I didn’t always like the way my colleagues spoke about women, but that had nothing to do with the job. Therefore, the question is a bit difficult to answer. If there are any issues with women, I think it is still the cultural aspects of our past where women were not allowed to work outside their home anymore when they got married or that we needed to do the ‘socially accepted jobs’, like being a nurse.

My advice is to just go for it, believe in yourself and your skills! Work together, give your opinion and listen. Listening and ‘translating’ can help to connect people. And be one of the guys, as in: just do your job.