Meet Chase

Let’s start off by learning a bit more about your life prior to Pega. Where are you from originally and what is your educational background?
I grew up in Indiana and moved to Arizona in high school, and ultimately stayed there to attend Arizona State University. I was one of those kids that had an interest in so many things, it caused me to change majors frequently. Even through college, I never really knew what I wanted to focus on to build a long career.

At the time, technology was at the bottom of the list. All I knew was I wanted to be a part of something that provided positive change to people, like nursing or philanthropy. After college, all of my indecisiveness led me to really struggle for answers and a jumpstart to a career, so I ended up in a healthcare call center as a customer representative answering phones. That’s when I was first introduced to Pega.

What motivated you to learn how to use Pega?
I just so happened to stumble into the world of Pega by accident while working in healthcare operations. While I started in the contact center, I moved my way up in the organization focusing on many different areas of the operation, like purchasing and accounts payable. After about 3 years, I was asked to join an automation team as a Business Analyst to provide subject matter expertise for our robotic process automations. I was a little hesitant, since I had no experience with automation.

Right around the time I started that new role, the company had received a trial of Pega and built a small team including myself to get familiar with it. I fell in love with Pega immediately. My imagination went wild with all of the possibilities that could be accomplished with Pega. I was motivated on a regular basis because I wanted to see and learn new things every time Pega came out with a release.

I was a part of a great Pega team that did some spectacular things with the technology. I was motivated because of how much fun it was to come to work and essentially “play” with the Pega tools. Most importantly, Pega provided me with an opportunity to satisfy my desire of providing positive change to people, because Pega is capable of digitally transforming and improving the world we live in!

"Pega is capable of digitally transforming and improving the world we live in!”

How has Pega shaped or impacted your career?
Pega has dramatically impacted my career, and quite honestly gave life and purpose to my career. I was still in my mid 20’s before I was introduced to Pega and had no concrete plan that would enable me to have a long, successful career. Now I am deeply passionate about Pega, and extremely focused on my career in the Pega world.

I was so fascinated and interested in the capabilities of Pega that I spent hours upon hours of personal time learning Pega through the amazing library of training courses in Pega Academy. Having no technical background whatsoever, Pega gave me an opportunity to be right in the middle of the technology world. As a Business Analyst, I started by studying and receiving my Pega Business Architect certification, but after learning Pega, I didn’t just want to be on the business side anymore. I wanted to know more about the development side, and that led me to five more Pega certifications, including the Senior System Architect certification. So has Pega shaped and impacted my career? Yes! Without a doubt. Pega provided me with the opportunity to make a difference in an industry that I didn’t think I would ever belong in.

How is Pega changing the organization where you work?
Pega is providing a complete organization-wide digital transformation for CNO Financial Group. CNO has had a workflow management system in place for 15 years, and has had a large mix of legacy systems used across multiple organizations within the company.

Pega is providing CNO with the opportunity to merge their multiple organizations and multiple systems into a single software solution. Using Pega is allowing CNO to enhance both the internal and customer facing processes and experience to improve the entire customer lifecycle, both for the customers and the CNO employees.

What message or advice would you give to anyone who is considering a career as a Pega Developer?
I would say the most important thing is to dive in with confidence and know that if you put in the time to really study Pega, it will not only become easier to understand, but it will become fun! It may seem like jumping off the deep end when starting with Pega, but I would say that is the best way to learn. Just be comfortable getting invested in Pega and learning through mistakes via trial and error. You can teach yourself what works by seeing what doesn’t work at the same time.

I would also encourage more non-technical people to consider a career in Pega. Let my story be an example that you don’t need to have programming experience to be able to transform your career with Pega!