Senior Agent Education Specialist
Virtual Contact Center Education/Curriculum Design
Making Education Personal
Graduating with a Bachelor of Science in education, Katie went right to work teaching elementary students in Orlando public schools.
After three years there, and with a real estate license in hand, she moved into property sales. That job ended four years later with the birth of her daughter, when Katie decided to stay home.
After the first few years of raising her daughter, Katie had a desire to go back into the workforce—and to do it remotely.
“Perfect Scenario”
That’s when she started researching at-home opportunities and found Working Solutions. The company contracted her as an education instructor, beginning in 2008.
“The whole work-from-home thing was so foreign to me at the time,” Katie said. “I did not even know there was the possibility of working as an educator in the virtual world.”
She said the job combined her passion for education, working from home and teaching adults. “The absolute perfect scenario just fell in my lap.”
Educator at Heart
Katie became an employee in 2012 as an agent education specialist, and today is an education and development manager.
In her current role, she’s charged with curriculum design and instruction. Katie collaborates with the client’s training team, taking its materials and integrating them into a virtual environment.
She also oversees instruction for each of her client’s programs. That means working in a long-distance classroom, with hands-on coordination of all instructors and agents.
Katie’s job includes several industries, focusing on consumer services and retail sales. More recently, she oversaw the creation and delivery of a travel client program, requiring nearly 100 agent seats.
In her free time, Katie helps lead a group of Girl Scouts, something she’s done for seven years. She’s also active in the children’s ministry at her church and her family recently began training for Give Kids the World, a program that helps terminally ill children live out their dreams for a week.
Bringing It to Life
Whatever program Katie and her team work on, they go to great lengths to make agent education professional and personal. That includes knowing as many as 60 contact center agents by name.
“You can’t expect agents to look at PowerPoint slides for hours on end. We create an engaging session, more interactive, to ensure the students are following us each step of the way.”
That’s especially important in a virtual classroom, where agents are prone to tune out if the pace is too slow and the atmosphere dull.
To that end, the team conducts interactive reviews, WebEx content polls, chat assessments, a lot of gamification and breakout sessions. The sessions divide the class into smaller groups, with more hands-on activities.
“We are constantly checking to make sure all agents are engaged. Our goal is to set up every agent in our classroom for success. We often build stronger relationships and rapport with our agents than is typical in a brick-and-mortar scenario.”
Ultimately, Katie said “it’s all about bringing education to life and making it personal.”
“It’s all about bringing education to life and making it personal.”
