How being scrappy and adaptable powers success
While Katherine Kirchner, Senior Vice President of Service Assurance, might be new to Zayo, she has been leading teams in the telecom and tech spaces for decades. Her adventurous spirit and flexible nature has allowed her to forge an unconventional career path spanning an impressive breadth of industries and roles. Her resume is a testament to the power of good old-fashioned hard work and finding opportunities everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.
From Small Town Roots to the Booming Telecommunications Industry
Katherine grew up in a small town in Montana, where the work ethic runs deep. While in college, she held down three part-time jobs, including weekends at Burger King, to pay down her student loans.
Though she originally wanted to pursue a degree in music, the practicalities of the requirements led her to reconsider. A conversation with a recruiter from DeVry University in the early ‘90s set her on an entirely different path. At the time, telecommunications was booming, and DeVry offered a program in telecom management. “Pick your salary” was the pitch that caught her attention, and Katherine was hooked. Good thing too, because she discovered she loved technology.
New Challenges and Diverse Opportunities
Katherine’s formal career began at Sprint, where she took on a variety of roles, starting with a job at the call center. It was a rough start, interrupting people’s dinners and getting hung up on a lot; but, as she says, it was a foot in the door. From there, she moved into administration, supply chain, and eventually took on more technical roles in network maintenance.
Along the way, Katherine held diverse positions at several other companies, including her hometown’s independent telephone company, Onvoy (now part of Zayo), and Comcast. At Comcast, she spent over a decade in various leadership roles, including overseeing engineering and product operations, tech support, customer service, and national call centers. Her work in launching and scaling Xfinity Mobile operations, and developing a strategy to boost mobile sales in call centers, post-Covid, was one of her most defining achievements.
Katherine’s leadership experience at Comcast, where she oversaw a team of over 3,000 employees and 8,000 outsourced agents, taught her invaluable lessons in employee development and team culture. The company underwent significant changes during her tenure, which helped her develop a crucial skill set in managing difficult situations and ensuring teams are set up for success.
After a brief retirement, Katherine found herself bored and itching for a new challenge. When an opportunity came to build operations for a startup in the telecom industry, she jumped at the chance. She later moved to a role at Indigo, a UK-based company, where she helped set up their U.S. operations. There, she built a network operations center and managed relationships with large clients like Zayo.
The Unpredictable Path to Leadership
Today, as SVP of Service Assurance at Zayo, Katherine’s vast and unanticipated experiences across multiple sectors of telecom has come full circle. Her deep knowledge of operations, customer service, and sales strategies equips her to lead Zayo’s service assurance team through complex challenges.
Katherine’s advice to other young, up-and-coming leaders: “Don’t wait for the perfect job that fits your degree. Seize opportunities, even if they seem like a step sideways.”
She emphasizes that experience, work ethic, and company fit matter more than a specific degree. As her career proves, the path isn’t always clear, but it’s the willingness to try new things, learn from every role, and build a well-rounded skill set that ultimately leads to success.
Katherine’s career is a powerful reminder that growth comes not from following a straight path, but from seizing the opportunities that surprise you along the way. Her journey reflects the importance of perseverance, a strong work ethic, and the belief that the best opportunities often come from unexpected places.