911 Dispatcher

So my advice to get started is actually to contact your local 911 agency and ask if you can do an observation. That gives you an opportunity to sit down with the dispatchers and watch what they're doing. I would have a list of questions ready for them and ask them. They are always going to be willing to answer all your questions, and you'll really be able to see a live example of what they do every single day. So you don't know if it's going to be busy or slow. You don't know what kind of calls are going to come in, but they'll let you listen to the 911 calls. You'll be able to hear how they dispatch out calls to the police or fire or the medics. And so it's a really good live opportunity for you to ask questions and see what the job is really about.

Another thing that you can do to help you get started is to practice your typing. We type very fast in this profession. When someone calls 911, they're more in an excited state and so they're gonna talk faster. You have to be able to keep up. One of the things that I would suggest to do is when you're watching TV, have your laptop out and type everything you hear. Just type it all out and this is going to help speed up your typing so that you're able to keep up with callers.