Celebrating 100 years: Gemma’s Story

Aunties, siblings and cousins! Head of Transformation, Gemma Zec, has a quite a family history at CSC. Six family members have worked for the organisation, the longest served 38 years before finally retiring!

‘CSC is like a big family. The calibre of the people, culture and willingness to support one another is really strong. The culture and connections are the longevity of its people.’

Gemma didn’t get the first role she applied for but fortunately was referred to the PSSap team and commenced her CSC story in 2007 as a Customer Services Officer.

'This gave me a really good insight into how a fund is administered and its end-to-end services. I credit my understanding of how CSC works to the fact that I got this nine-month induction into ComSuper and CSC. My career really took off after that.’

Moving into technical project roles – tax changes, insurance policy redesign and implementation, system improvement, procurement RFT and outsourcing of PSSap – before moving into relationship management roles – being the single point of contact for external stakeholders and becoming the Project Manager for the ComSuper merger – Gemma has embraced big opportunities!

‘I feel like I’ve been thrown into roles where there is a problem. But I’ve loved it because I think I’d have become bored if I wasn’t doing something challenging or learning new things all the time. My work hasn’t lacked that!‘

But it’s in her current role as Head of Transformation that Gemma feels most motivated. The time and thinking it’s taken to get the organisation to the point of buy-in and invest in the opportunities that it provides has been worthwhile. Instead of working on a single problem (e.g. a piece of technology, a people structure, a process), the Transformation Program is about bringing all of that together to create an outcome.

Seeing the shift from where we do our work transactionally and functionally to being outcome focused has created the most amount of purpose for Gemma.

‘The Transformation Program is an opportunity to make a fundamental change and focus on what really matters.’