I work in Insurance: Richard Radevsky, technical director, Charles Taylor

What is your role?

I am the technical director at Charles Taylor Adjusting. I have an engineering background and spent time working as a consulting engineer. After this, some friends and I started a loss adjusting and risk consultancy practice, which was bought a few years ago by Charles Taylor.

What does an average day look like?

My day-to-day activities involve a mixture of risk engineering surveys of major construction projects around the world and the adjusting of technical and engineering claims. My days vary. Quite a bit of my time is spent travelling around the world and meeting project teams or companies that have made claims and their insurers. On other days, I write quite lengthy reports of surveys for claims adjustments. I spend time in our head office meeting clients, attending conferences or working with the International Association of Engineering Insurers.

How is your job linked to insurance?

Most of my work is carried out on behalf of insurers, reinsurers or brokers. I’m tasked with helping to explain and improve risks or dealing with claims and preparing reports for clients. Over the years, I have worked on a varied portfolio of claims and consultancy assignments worldwide and have undertaken risk surveys of technical risks and provided risk engineering to some of the world’s largest construction projects.

What have some of the highlights been?

One of the highlights of the job has to be the travel. Throughout my career, I have spent time visiting more than 80 countries and meeting great people along the way. I have had the opportunity of working on some of the world’s largest engineering projects and seeing these develop over time.

What are some of the challenges?

Over the years, the assignments and projects that I have been sent to work on have become larger and more complex. This makes the job more challenging as the risks often increase but it also makes the job more interesting. Working abroad has meant that one of the major challenges has been to work with people from different cultures, to win their trust and then be able to communicate with them effectively about complex risks.

What response do you get when you say you work in insurance?

It depends on how much the person knows of the insurance world. Those with little knowledge sometimes think it’s an office-based administration job. Usually it doesn’t take too long to explain that it is nothing like that. Most people are particularly interested about the travel aspect of the job and the scale and variety of the projects that I work on.