Anita Mitchell

My journey in training and education spans over 25 years, and it all started in the school system where I taught for 10 years. During 5 of those years, I conducted summer training sessions for teachers in Math and Science, and that's where I began my love for training. I thought if I could touch 25 teachers and get them motivated to try something new, I could influence far more than just the 25 students I had in my own classroom. From there, I moved to ALSAC St. Jude Children's Research Hospital where I worked for 5 years on the fundraising side. I started as a training specialist in HR doing benefits and new hire orientation, taking new employees on tours of the hospital through a two-week training program. In my third year, I moved into a training and quality management role where I managed people who scored calls and conducted training for call center agents doing telemarketing to raise money for the hospital. Then in 2010, I got a call from Federal Express air operations, and honestly, I didn't even remember applying. I went through a panel interview with six people, including four pilots, and midstream I stopped them and asked if I had ever said I could fly a plane, because all their questions seemed to be around aviation. They laughed and said no, it had nothing to do with that, but I really believed in the premise that doctors practice medicine, so I figured I could learn anything. I spent 11 years at FedEx managing the onboarding for crew members through a four-week program that included captain's courses. We created content and I continued my love for learning management systems, implementing two different LMS systems between ALSAC and FedEx. I implemented quarterly online training for pilots who lived everywhere and just came in to fly, and I realized we could do it online so they could take it from home instead of flying them in and paying for them to come to Memphis. In 2020, I went through a divorce, and my kids had just gone off to college. I had to decide if I was going to keep the house and refinance, and I needed to figure out how to handle being the lead in the household for paying bills, which was all new for me. I looked for a management role because I needed to be able to do the things I needed to do, and that's when Brother International Corporation came around. I've been here now 5 years, managing a team of five people including a videographer/photographer, two instructional designers, one training specialist, and one content writer who writes procedures. We create training content for call centers, and Brother makes printers, sewing machines, and labelers. The company is out of Japan, though we have a lot more U.S. people now. We have an LMS system where we create self-paced courses, and our initiative now is creating content in multiple languages because we have supply chain areas and warehouses not only in three locations in the United States but also in Japan and the Philippines. My team has set up customer service for a team in Jamaica with over 200 employees, we moved from our Dominican Republic location, and now we're looking to Colombia for a couple other new vendors. Because of my itch to do something and add something to myself, I decided to do a one-brother approach where I lean in to help security and safety for all supply chain groups from California to South Carolina. We're translating from Japanese to other languages I had never heard of within the last year, and my next goal is to create a Copilot agent through Microsoft, kind of like a chatbot, so that any employee with access to a computer and Microsoft 365 Copilot can ask any question within their realm about their guides, procedures, and get an answer immediately. I try to stretch just to keep myself from getting bored.