Diva Tech Talk interviewed Loretta Yakima, currently a senior project manager under contract at ZF TRW (www.zf.com ). Loretta credits her parents for all facets of her success. “They grounded me so much,” she said. Her love for technology dated from her Michigan public high school’s career preparation center where she enrolled in a data processing class. “It was new and exciting.”  She learned how to code in both RPG and Cobol, “two of the toughest languages” to master. With her programming proficiency, Loretta applied advanced credits to her college degree, and was offered a scholarship to a nearby business school.  She matriculated to Oakland University, in Rochester, MI,  with a major in Economics and a minor in Information Systems.  She also worked full time first for a small consulting company, implementing “Y2K” code changes; and then in information technology for Tier One automotive supplier, Lear Corporation (www.lear.com). Later, Loretta would go on to get her MBA from Walsh College in 2009. 

After graduating Loretta became a programmer/business analyst at Pulte Corporation (www.pulte.com), a U.S.-based home-building company, where she grew as the company did.  She worked with ERP software, and then developed a wide variety of Web-based applications, supporting every operation inside the company.  Loretta then evolved into a project management role, where “we didn’t just focus on IT, but were engrained in the process side of things.” At Pulte, as the recession hit, she also worked on “how to change our business processes to become more efficient.”   She moved from information technology, a few years later, and “hopped the fence” to Pulte’s finance department where she then managed the national purchasing shared services group, a total of 65 people, who managed the administration for all labor and materials contracts for the company. A key lesson that Loretta learned from her 15 years at Pulte was the importance of strong partnership between the information technology group and the rest of the business. She benefited from strong leadership training, particularly based on Franklin Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (http://www.franklincovey.com/leadership/7-habits.php/).

When Pulte moved to Atlanta, Georgia, Loretta chose to remain in Michigan. She moved to a part-time role as a solutions architect, building customer applications for Detroit-based Digerati and then moved over to Chrysalis Global Consulting (http://www.chrysalisglobal.com), a company that specializes in change management and project management. Under the Chrysalis aegis, she landed her contract role at ZF TRW, a global automotive supplier. “My role is with the financial systems group.   We are figuring out how to merge all the finance systems between ZF and TRW. It’s huge, and it’s exciting and it’s fun.”

Loretta would catalogue her personal strengths as being a good listener/diagnostician, a hard worker, empathetic and a skilled multitasker. (“I love being busy.  I love having a lot of things going on.”)

To accomplish everything well in life, Loretta said: “You must stay positive, and learn to smile,” no matter what the situation.

 Loretta’s three main leadership lessons for other women and girls are:

• Don’t be afraid. Try technology out.
• Know yourself and what is uniquely important to you, personally.
• Learn how to network.

Loretta would like to be involved with a company or an educational institution that “has enough financial backing to get started with students early on. I think back to the high school technology program in which I was involved.  I would love to build more programs like that, because I think it’s so important --- especially for girls.” Loretta said.

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