Super industry and mentoring veteran takes crown

Jennifer Dean, a 21-year veteran of the superannuation industry and a prolific mentor of women, has won Superannuation Executive of the Year Award for 2018.

In the last 12 months at Aon Australia, Dean oversaw the successful and huge rebranding of the Aon Master Trust into smartMonday, which focused on making the superannuation product more modern, approachable and customer-centric.

She also last year developed the Master Trust’s growth strategy, which should see the trust’s funds under management increase by five times in the next five years.

Throughout this process, as in her wider career, Dean lived by her values while still delivering strong business results. She says that doing this is one of the things she’s most proud of in her career.

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These successes saw Dean recently become a partner at Aon, with the executive finding that this experience showed her firsthand how encouraging seeing a woman in a senior role can be to younger women in the industry.

Dean says she underestimated the importance of this until she witnessed the “genuine excitement amongst the women in the team at seeing ‘someone like me’” reach partner level.

She highlights the importance of strong female role models, mentoring, and then a level up with sponsorship, as key ways that seeing women in senior positions can help other women forge the pathway to the top.

Dean is also proud of the work she has done to offer support and guidance to young women as a mentor and coach.

Through the Lucy Mentoring program, Jennifer has mentored students from the University of Sydney, UTS and Macquarie University for over eight years. She has also coached young women’s basketball teams for the Hornsby Ku Ring Gai Basketball Association for over a decade.