2026 Schedule

A case study on how the University of Florida IT Help Desk has evolved our on the job training to engage and support the next generation of IT support workers.
It has become increasingly more difficult to engage the Gen Z workforce especially when we try to apply outdated training methods to our young student employees. We have found that the traditional methods of training call center employees don't cover the topics necessary for young people who may have never had to interact with other people over the phone or email.

After struggling with our outdated training and student employee retention, I made the decision to hire an educator instead of an IT professional to head the training efforts at the UFIT Help Desk. I brought her in with the idea to change on the job training to instead run like a college course. With her background in education, our new trainer completely revamped our training using our campus eLearning solution (canvas) to create complete course for our new employees. This course has everything a normal college class would have, lectures, quizzes, homework, and final exams. Pairing the course with on the job shadowing and hands on calls, we were able to actively engage these younger employees in a way that they are already accustomed to either from high school or college.

Having a structured course however, was not enough, we still had trouble with retention as the student employees still didn't feel comfortable talking on the phones and composing emails. Our trainer decided to use conversational AI to draft responses to emails and even use it live while on a call to help come up with better ways to explain things. This coupled with mock calls and the use of some canned responses, we found that students were much more comfortable after the training was complete and we started to see a payoff in the way of longer retention.

During the Session, we will give examples of the course that was created with specific examples of quizzes and lectures that we give. Along with a demo of the prompts we use in our conversational AI to come up with responses to clients.

We will also discuss future plans such as the use Team Dynamix AI to find Knowledge Base articles and how it will integrate with ticket creation and Agentic AI to help younger clients that do not want to talk on the phone.

Takeaway

- benefits of switching from an IT trainer to an Education based training
- The importance of teaching young employees how to interact with clients
- AI is useful in creating professional responses to clients
- Use training methods that younger employees are used to instead of forcing outdated methods