Her Story
About Lara
Lara Komoroski is a Public Safety Communications leader with approximately 12 years of experience in emergency communications and crisis management. She currently serves as the Director of Professional Development for Hunterdon County Communications, a role she has held for the past several months, where she leads training, onboarding, and continuing education for public safety telecommunicators. In this capacity, she oversees certification maintenance, including APCO 911 operator standards and State Emergency Medical Dispatch requirements, while also managing training systems, performance standards, and operational policies that support consistency and excellence across the communications center.
Prior to her current role, Lara spent more than a decade with a state-level emergency communications center, where she worked as both a Public Safety Telecommunicator and an instructor. In that environment, she operated in a high-volume, high-pressure statewide system while also serving as a trainer responsible for evaluating personnel, delivering scenario-based instruction, and supporting curriculum development. Her work included maintaining operational readiness, contributing to quality assurance and quality improvement efforts, and ensuring adherence to accreditation and best-practice standards across emergency communications operations.
Lara’s commitment to public safety is deeply rooted in her personal background and family legacy. Public safety has been a consistent presence throughout her life her mother is a military veteran, her father worked in public safety, and her grandfather served in emergency management and was a lifetime member of the fire company in Colonia. She describes her career as something she was naturally drawn into through this family connection, and she has since built it into a long-term professional passion. She is particularly focused on addressing one of the field’s most persistent challenges staffing shortages and limited public awareness of the 911 telecommunicator profession. She is passionate about increasing visibility for the critical role of dispatchers, ensuring the public understands that behind every emergency response is a trained professional coordinating care, safety, and response long before first responders arrive on scene.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Lara
01What do you attribute your success to?
Honestly, it's a passion for the field. Ever since I got into this career field, it has almost consumed me to a point. I truly love public safety, emergency management, and specifically communications when it comes to emergencies. This passion drives everything I do day to day, and I'm committed to bringing awareness to public safety telecommunications as a career. I'm less interested in personal recognition and more focused on highlighting this career path that is really struggling at the moment to find people who are even aware of its existence. The visibility of the career itself is very important to me.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Take every training that comes available. Any flyer that you get, any opportunity that you have to take any sort of continuing education is vital to your career, because if you look to change your career, or if you look to move to a different agency, they're going to want to see those certificates. So any training that you have available to you, take that opportunity, take the training, never stop advancing your learning in your field. I have a mountain of certificates, and every single one of them I have gained over the 12 years of my career, and that follows my recommendation of just take every training that comes available to you.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Entering my field of work is actually fairly easy. Take the shot. That's kind of the best advice that I have. If an opportunity comes available, don't hedge your bets, take the shot, because chances are, someone's looking for exactly you. Don't hesitate when opportunities present themselves in public safety telecommunications, because this field needs people and if you're interested, you're likely exactly what they're looking for.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge in the field at the moment is staffing. 911 is notoriously understaffed. It's very difficult to retain employees, as well as just find new employees. It's such a niche career, a lot of people don't even know it exists until someone sends them a flyer or something like that, or if they know someone who's already in public safety. There's very little exposure to the career of public safety telecommunicator. So many individuals are interested in private corporations, it's very difficult to get people excited for the idea of working in the public sector. They think police officer, they think firefighter, they think EMT, but very rarely do they think about the person on the other side of the radio. This career is almost a dying career because of the lack of awareness and the difficulty in attracting people to public sector work.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Some of the values that consistently come up whenever I speak to either the employees that I work with or senior management here would be accountability, for one. If you make a mistake, take accountability for it. There's always a path forward. And efficiency and efficacy. You want to make sure that you are efficient in your career, and in your duties, your function, and you want to make sure that you are effective. So if something is causing you to be less efficient, you need to find a way, you need to find a path that makes it more efficient to perform. These three values guide everything I do both professionally and personally.
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