Charles Anderson

What is the biggest challenge you had to overcome to get to where you are now professionally? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge I had to overcome was getting out of debt, both school and credit wise. My parents never taught me to be responsible with money or credit, and later found out they had filed for bankruptcy. It took me 10 years to pay off most of my college and credit debt and another 5 or so to get my credit back into the "Good/Excellent" rating. I overcame it by creating a budget and ensuring that I could pay all monthly debts (rent, utilities, etc) without using any credit cards and then moved slowly to getting credit cards or loans more consciously.

In layperson terms, what do you actually do at work?

I review reports that show customer issues (over or under billing - monthly service and/or features that are not being billed correctly). Then run a quantification to determine if there are additional customers experiencing the similar issue so this information can be provided to Information Technology to correct all customers to ensure proper billing, less calls into call centers and non-disgruntled customers.

When you were a student, did you do anything outside of school to build skills or get knowledge that has helped your career?

I've always been hands on learner. I used to build websites for friends. I would either play around with the developer tools to get the site to work the way I wanted it to OR use search engines to help me address the issue. Working reports and quantifications I use Microsoft Excel and SQL a lot. I would do the same; play around by trial and error, use the Help function or online search engines to get what I wanted completed.

How did you start building your network?

I am an extrovert by nature and will strike up a conversation with strangers in line. By working in several departments (customer service, information technology and finance), I have met many different people. I also have either coached or managed soccer teams, so I run across other coaches and of course parents that work in different fields. Now that LinkedIn is there for business networking it helps. Overall I would say being able to talk to almost anyone about anything helped me build my network, but also getting involved in other areas (sports, IT, etc) helped as well.