Are you ready to explore a world of possibilities, both at work and during your time off? Join our American Airlines family, and you’ll travel the world, grow your expertise and become the best version of you. As you embark on a new journey, you’ll tackle challenges with flexibility and grace, learning new skills and advancing your career while having the time of your life. Feel free to enrich both your personal and work life and hop on board!

• This job is a member of the Absence and Return Center Operations Team within the People Division.
• Responsible for day-to-day leadership of team leads, case managers, and auditors in their span of care within the Absence and Return Center. This position manages a team of highly skilled leave of absence professionals who process leave requests for approximately 100,000 team members across the airline. This position trains, coaches, develops, and manages staffing of this elite team to achieve all performance goals including quality, accuracy, and productivity, resolves employee concerns at the first point of contact, and handles escalations from the field and leadership, all while ensuring compliance with applicable Company policies as well as state and federal regulations.

• Evaluate effectiveness of leave policies and procedures and help develop new, streamlined processes, ensuring alignment with the company’s goals and strategy
• Partner on technology solutions and process enhancements for leave administration
• Develop and track metrics related to leave of absence cases, staffing, lost time, and employee experience including regular reports to leadership to inform strategic improvement opportunities
• Act as an expert on leave of absence cases including federal and state-mandated regulations as well as certain international policies
• Ensure compliance with all federal, state, and company leave policies, including FMLA and DOL compliance standards
• Manages, mentors, and develops team members
• Organize quarterly team meetings to provide training and business updates
• Partner with operational leadership to facilitate training presentations and to resolve escalated absence matters
• Partner with HR and legal on complex FMLA cases, grievances, and Department of Labor (DOL) complaints

Minimum Qualifications – Education & Prior Job Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree in relevant field or equivalent experience
• 5 years of professional experience
• 3-5 years of leadership of managing teams

Preferred Qualifications – Education & Prior Job Experience

• Strong FMLA knowledge as well as experience in defining and implementing leave management business processes. Global leave knowledge is a plus
• Previous experience in a unionized environment
• Experience working in the airline industry
• Experience working with third party administrators

Skills, Licenses, and Certifications

• Demonstrated functional knowledge of Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
• Ability to execute multiple projects concurrently and prioritize to meet deadlines in a fast-paced environment with minimal supervision
• Ability to be highly collaborative working ability with internal cross-functional business partners to resolve problems and streamline shared processes
• Ability to be an innovative problem solver who can take an idea from conception through execution
• Ability to demonstrate discretion, integrity, judgment, responsiveness, strong attention to detail and common sense
• Ability to be operationally and metrics focused in order to deliver tactically, and use analytics to solve problems and develop solutions

Feel free to take advantage of all that American Airlines has to offer:

• Travel Perks: Ready to explore the world? You, your family and your friends can reach 365 destinations on more than 6,800 daily flights across our global network.
• Health Benefits: On day one, you’ll have access to your health, dental, prescription and vision benefits to help you stay well. And that’s just the start, we also offer virtual doctor visits, flexible spending accounts and more.
• Wellness Programs: We want you to be the best version of yourself – that’s why our wellness programs provide you with all the right tools, resources and support you need.
• 401(k) Program: Available upon hire and, depending on the workgroup, employer contributions to your 401(k) program are available after one year.
• Additional Benefits: Other great benefits include our Employee Assistance Program, pet insurance and discounts on hotels, cars, cruises and more

From the team members we hire to the customers we serve, inclusion and diversity are the foundation of the dynamic workforce at American Airlines. Our 20+ Employee Business Resource Groups are focused on connecting our team members to our customers, suppliers, communities and shareholders, helping team members reach their full potential and creating an inclusive work environment to meet and exceed the needs of our diverse world.

Are you ready to feel a tremendous sense of pride and satisfaction as you do your part to keep the largest airline in the world running smoothly as we care for people on life’s journey? Feel free to be yourself at American.