Did you know that call center agents need a diverse range of skills and abilities to be great at their jobs? As a high school student, you probably need to grow your own skills and gain work experience to get to the next big step in your life and career, but there's good news. You can develop those skills while starting with a job at a contact center. 

Not to mention, if you're like many high school students, you may not know what you want to do for a career. That's understandable. How could you even know the possibilities until you get out there and see for yourself? Working in a diverse environment such as a contact center can be the best way to learn more about potential careers. You might even discover something you love that you never even considered!

Sharpen Your Skills and Learn New Ones

Here at The Connection, we are all about training. We want each agent to love their job and excel at it, so we do everything we can to help you become your best. We call our agents customer service representatives, or CSRs, because serving customers is the purpose of every contact – whether we are helping someone place an order, answering a question, or helping solve a problem.

It helps if you are a “people person,” but whether you a natural at dealing with people or not, we will teach you the skills and traits you need. Things like:

• Problem-solving
• Documentation
• Analyzing information
• Multi-tasking
• Empathy
• Persuasion
• Negotiation and conflict resolution
• Social perceptiveness
• Teaching others

Where Could Your Call Center Work Lead?

With good customer service skills and experience, you will be ready to succeed in an amazing variety of careers. You could move into positions similar to your call center work, but with more responsibility, such as:

• Client relations, helping build ongoing, positive relationships with a select group of customers.
• Membership services, another job that focuses on specific groups of customers. “Members” could be bank or insurance company customers or holders of a particular credit card, but industry-specific trade associations and other non-profit organizations also have members.
• Technical support, which requires extensive knowledge of specific products as well as customer service skills to help people troubleshoot and fix problems. Technical support covers everything from software and other technology to tools and machines.

Or you could move up and branch out into a different type of career. You may need additional education or formal training to pursue these careers. However, many jobs still require the same kinds of customer service and “people” skills you will learn working in a contact center. For example:

• Sales (in any industry)
• Marketing
• Operations
• Financial services
• Health care jobs such as physician assistant, dental hygienist, physical or occupational therapist, or Registered Nurse
• Virtually any supervisory or management position, because employees who work under you are customers, too

Grow Your Career at The Connection

A call center is much more than CSRs who deal with customers. Like other businesses, The Connection incorporates a wide variety of departments that work together to help our company grow and succeed. And we take pride in promoting from within, whenever possible. So, if you start working here as a CSR, you could move up the ladder without moving away from the call center itself – to supervisor, trainer, or into human resources. Or you could move into a different field such as computers or finance or facilities management.

A lot of the people here at The Connection who started on the phones are now working in management-level positions such as:

• Administrative Assistant
• HR Administrator
• Accounting Coordinator
• Telecommunications Analyst
• Manager of Systems Administration
• Workforce Manager
• Chief Technical Officer (began as Program Manager)

Your career could take a new direction, with greater responsibility, pay and learning opportunities, without having to go somewhere else. At the very least, as a CSR at The Connection, you will learn top-notch customer service skills and gain valuable experience that will serve you well in whatever career you choose. View our careers page today to learn more about potential openings!