For as much as the current generation loves to bash the 20-somethings entering into the workforce and assign clichés about their demeanor and work ethic, the...
Author - Heather Hernandez
Our Gen Y Guest: Heather Hernandez is a senior research engineer at USAA where she works in the Revolutionary Innovation department. Her primary responsibility is to identify industry-changing ideas within the financial services space and develop them from incubation to production implementation for the benefit of USAA’s more than 10 million members and 25,000 employees.
Heather spent her first three years at USAA supporting the 24x7 availability of USAA applications by administering and troubleshooting the test and production environments with development teams. After that she spent two years implementing a solution that delivers the most relevant inbound real-time marketing offers to USAA’s members on USAA.COM, mobile, and the employee facing customer-relationship management tool.
Outside of her normal roles, Heather has embraced innovation, including participating in internal coding competitions known as “Code as ICE”. She won first place in two coding competitions including the inaugural event. Both prototypes were embraced by the business and she helped implement them in production. She currently holds one USAA patent with two additional patents pending.
Upon starting at USAA, Heather identified a need for a new-hire employee group, which led her to being one of the co-founders of Nexus, an internal employee resource group focusing on attracting and retaining quality IT talent.
Heather holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Texas at San Antonio, distinguished as a cum laude graduate.
