She’s got what it takes
Hollie Porter can thank a romance with a Quebecer, his rejection from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a comment from a disabled woman in a changing room, an offering from a CEGEP course calendar and the difficulty that family members experienced from Hurricane Katrina for her discovering a fruitful career in damage insurance.
The 33-year-old former Louisiana native, who spoke virtually no French when she arrived in 2003, currently works as a successful team leader, mostly in French, for Belair-direct in Quebec City and was recently awarded the Marcel Tassé award, which recognizes the province’s most promising recent insurance studies graduate.
Porter’s story in insurance began less than a decade ago after she met and fell in love with a Quebecer named Yves Giroux while he was visiting New Orleans. He was ready to move to the United States, but, it being not long after 9/11, his application for citizenship was refused. The couple tried again, this time with her applying in his home country.
They married and moved to the Quebec City area, where Porter was eventually accepted as a landed immigrant. She enrolled in French lessons, and began to move beyond gestures and flash cards.
Having worked in retail in Louisiana, she got work at a Reitman’s store. One day, one of her regular customers, a disabled woman whom she accompanied to the changing room, let her know how impressed she was with her skills. “You have too much talent. You need to be doing something more.”
“That was the turning point,” said Porter, who decided to look through local CEGEP course calendars for a suitable profession to study toward. She thought insurance might interest her. While she had left New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, family and friends were deeply affected by it, with an aunt who had not been insured suffering considerable loss, and a cousin losing her home. “It brought me back to that moment.”
She was impressed that most of the professors she met at the CEGEP’S open house were working in the industry. They told her she would be in contact with clients every day, something that spoke to her strength in retail. She thought she could do things differently than some of the insurance agents she had heard about in New Orleans. “There was a lack of guidance on the part of the agents.”
She enrolled in the certificate program at CEGEP de Sainte-foy and was met with some skepticism from one of her professors, who did not think she had the chops to complete the program in French, especially since he saw her lugging around a French-english dictionary to class. But she showed him, scoring second-highest in the first exam for his course and eventually finishing third in her class.
In 2010, with a degree in hand she received six job offers and chose Belair-direct “for their philosophy of customer service.”
Ironically, she worked hard to become bilingual so that she could study and work in French, but it was her English skills and the contacts she could make with anglophone clients that interested prospective employers.
She’s now a role model, not only for the 17 people on her team that she has been leading for the past year, but also for her niece Rebekkah Sloan, who has come to Quebec City to live for a year with Porter and Giroux so that she could have enough French to go back to Louisiana and teach the language that Porter now speaks so well.