Not for people with anxiety or depression
Pros
The pay is great for a job that doesn't require any specific experience or background. Fantastic benefits package, including a 6% match on 401K and a generous profit-sharing program called "gainshare." If you do well as a CGA, you can move into injury or physical damage relatively easily and quickly. Diversity and Inclusion--the company does a great job of promoting women and making sure it has a diverse employee base.
Cons
Your job is to get yelled at. That's what it boils down to. Every day, no matter how much you bend over backwards to help someone out, they're going to yell at you. I was routinely praised by my supervisors for how well I did my job, I routinely hit my metrics every month, and I was promoted to an URBI immersion before I left so clearly I was good at my job. It simply doesn't matter how good you are at your job, you're going to get screamed at by customers and claimants multiple times a day for things which are totally outside of your control. Which brings me to my next point: this is not a job for anyone who suffers from anxiety or depression. You will not survive this job if you are prone to these conditions. Every single day, I woke up feeling like there was an elephant sitting on my chest. I was terrified to go to work, terrified to spend another day frantically trying to meet expectations with an unreasonable workload, terrified to say one incorrect thing on a call and be berated by my supervisor for it. This fear started to permeate every part of my life, to the point where I'd be driving home on a Friday and already be filled with dread about going back to work the next Monday. I was on what should have been a wonderful vacation abroad and spent half of it worrying about work. I don't know if you've read Foucault, but if you have, his idea of the panopticon is everywhere at Progressive. Most of your calls are recorded, and your supervisors regularly listen in on them and provide feedback. They go through each of your claims and either leave directions for things to fix, or pull you into scary one-on-one meetings where they harp on your failures for over an hour (one of these meetings lasted three and a half hours for me, in which my team lead gave negative feedback on every claim I had handled in the last 4-6 months--it felt like a surprise attack). Then, the very next day, they'll tell you what an incredible job you're doing and to keep it up. It's just constant whiplash (no pun intended); you never know if you're the best person in your office or if you're about to get fired. In my time at Progressive, I had four different supervisors and they all managed in this exact same way, so I think it's honestly how they're trained to manage. If that's the case, that's terrifying. When I finally came to my supervisors with these concerns and talked to them about how it was affecting my mental health, I was encouraged to leave. "Not everyone is cut out for claims," they said, as if it would be unreasonable for them to make any sort of adjustment or even recognize their own shortcomings. So I quit the very next day, without even having started applying for other jobs. That's how done I was with working claims for Progressive. Look, Progressive's corporate culture seems great in the big picture. There are a ton of people (mostly in the big corporate offices in Cleveland) who have worked with Progressive for upwards of twenty years. I'm sure there are probably good managers elsewhere in the organization. But you won't find them in claims. I've talked to folks I met in training (back when training flew folks in to Cleveland for two weeks of fun) who worked all over the country as Claims Generalist Associates. Very smart, hardworking, nice people. None of us lasted more than a year and a half. Many quit within six months. They will tell you it is easy to move into Special Investigations or Fire/Theft. It's not. The people who work in those departments never leave. Yes, it's technically "just one promotion away," but the slots themselves never open up. People are rotated into Fire/Theft immersions every year, kick total butt and get top praise from their supervisors, and are told at the end of the immersion that there just aren't any jobs available so they'll have to go back to being a CGA. So essentially, they got you to work a year in a job that should pay more, but since it's just an immersion they only have to pay you the CGA rate. Immersions are a great idea, but they only work if there's a chance of getting an actual promotion into the role. Often, offices use them as a way to save a few thousand dollars and just get someone's hopes up.