Get to Know the CyberCoach Team – Sara Pakarinen

Sara Pakarinen is our Cyber Education Designer, bringing her versatile experience with education, customer service and software development to design and develop content for CyberCoach. She is also an experienced game educator and is interested in the pedagogy of learning, bringing her valuable perspective to our new and existing trainings. 

How Does Your Typical Day Look Like, Sara?

"Together with our data analysis team, we look at and discuss the feedback we've received from customers each week. We evaluate what needs action and coordinate the needed tasks around the organization. I’ll also independently test language- and scenario-related issues and bugs based on our own observations and user feedback. As a part of the feedback process, I monitor the general rating performance of our content, and take action if a training is constantly rated lower than our average 4/5, or often gets negative open feedback."

"I also host our weekly internal Peer Testing sessions, where all CyberCoach team members participate as often as possible. We focus on testing new or existing trainings, checking language localizations and testing other content or features that require more eyes to evaluate the development needs. We have had a lot of focus on language revision, including new localized language versions, and I have been heavily involved in this process. Even if we utilize automatized translations in parts of our process, we want to ensure the human touch in all content and images included in trainings. Of course, all our dashboard and admin content is also translated into local languages. We have mostly been able to coordinate quality checking with our international and multi-lingual employees."

"I’m no stranger to working at events too, and when the opportunity arises, you can find me bustling away representing our company or the CyberCivicDuty-campaign at multiple events. The bulk of my day and week is, however, usually spent on working on our content, whether that’s fixing typos or issues in existing scenarios that have been spotted in our internal testing or by customers, or working on new content. This can consist of anything from drawing arrows everywhere in diagrams to writing and/or translating text and all the way to banging my head against the wall when a piece of code doesn't work."

Why CyberCoach? What Makes You Happy at Your Work?

"I always say this, but I've always wanted to combine creativity, computer technology & working with and helping people, especially kids and youth, in my career. I’ve studied photography and software engineering. I’ve been on the frontline of game education in Finland, having spent 5+ years as a Game educator & Esports Coach. My jump to the cybersecurity industry happened at the start of 2023 when I got the opportunity to join CyberCoach, and I’m happy to be here."

"Our flexible working environment certainly contributes to being happy at work and having a great work-life balance. I’m able to choose the times and days of the week when I work, and the 4-day work week is instrumental in maintaining a healthy balance and leaving me free time to pursue my other passions, like video gaming and volunteering. Our inclusive workplace and having the opportunity to develop and contribute makes me feel what I say has actual purpose, meaning and effect."

"Like I said before, helping others is important to me, and one of the most important factors in my work is definitely the social impact aspect. It’s amazing to see a company & it’s employees actually care and actively work on making a positive cyber social impact in multiple different ways, like the previously mentioned campaign and our other initiatives. And all of us, regardless of who you are and where you work, need cybersecurity education. Here at CyberCoach I really can contribute to making the world a better place."