Administrative Professionals Day: Meet Nia Rollins

Today is Administrative Professionals Day, a day dedicated to those who keep businesses and organizations on track.

Meet some of RTD’s mighty business supports who ensure the agency has what it needs to serve the people of the Denver metro area.

Every person has a journey. For some, the journey may involve staying in their hometown for much of their childhood and adult life. For others, it may involve moving across the country. For Civil Rights Division’s business support Nia Rollins, her journey to RTD spanned a career change and approximately 8,500 miles from St. Louis to Las Vegas to Anchorage to Denver.

A St. Louis native, Rollins attended the University of Nevada-Las Vegas to work toward her dream of becoming a teacher. She graduated from UNLV in 2016 with a degree in elementary education and moved to Anchorage, Alaska, soon after with her husband to begin her career.

“Teaching was a job that I knew I wanted for most of my life,” Rollins said. “That’s what I thought I wanted to do since I was 5.”

Rollins spent six years in Anchorage teaching middle school math when she realized it was time for a career change.

“I loved my students, and I loved teaching math,” Rollins said. “But if you have ever been into an American school, you know that teachers face some problems, and I needed to take a little bit of a step back from that role.”

Soon after, Rollins made the switch from public education to an administrative role with a marine construction company in Anchorage, where she found that the skills she learned teaching made her very efficient in her new position.

“As teachers, we do a lot,” Rollins said. “Of course, teaching is one of our jobs, but the other half of our job is a mix of organization and administration duties like paperwork, filing, contacting people, et cetera.”

While Rollins enjoyed her new role, she began to notice that Anchorage did not offer the same career advancement opportunities as compared to other major U.S. mainland cities.

Rollins and her husband began looking around for places that offered the same outdoor activities Anchorage did, but also were more modern and afforded more opportunities for young professionals to grow.

Denver checked all the boxes – and Rollins and her husband had friends here. They moved to the city in July 2022.

While looking for jobs in Denver, Rollins came across RTD, which, at the time, was hiring for a business support position in the Civil Rights Division. Seeing that she could easily apply her experience, skill set and knowledge from her previous company, Rollins jumped on the opportunity. She was hired and began her role April 17, 2023.

Being a business support for the Civil Rights Division means being agile and able to handle multiple tasks at once, a challenge Rollins eagerly takes on daily with a smile on her face.

“Every day looks different,” she said.

Rollins handles everything from getting new hires set up with all of their supplies and Information Technology needs to organizing files for the Small Business Opportunity office, handling Equal Employment Opportunity administrative tasks for trainings and coordinating with managers to fulfill requests.

“Naturally, I’m a very organized and detail-oriented person,” Rollins said. “Some of the other jobs that I’ve had before I started my teaching career, like jobs that I had in college and things like that, were a business support-esque role. That’s when I realized that this is what I wanted to do!”

On top of the responsibilities above, Rollins took it upon herself to bring the division’s budget tracking into the digital age.

“I noticed over the last year, many managers shared statements like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how much money I’ve spent out of this budget,’” Rollins said. “’I’m not sure where these expenses have gone.’ So, I thought, ‘You know what, let me just put together a tracker, because our funds only come out of a few different sources.’”

Rollins put her focus into building one spreadsheet that would automatically calculate how many funds are in the budget, as well as keeping tabs on who is spending how much on what.

“You can see when those transactions happen,” she said. “I have it broken down by month, so users can see how much was spent by who, allowing us to move forward with budgetary decisions more effectively.”

Rollins recalls her work on the budget tracker being one of her favorite memories over the short year she has worked at RTD, noting how much time it has saved with recordkeeping.

“I don’t like to take more time on things than what is needed to be taken,” she said.

Rollins is also designing a guide for new employees to the Civil Rights Division that gives them a jumpstart on their work. The guide contains an overview of the work the Civil Rights Division does; a breakdown of the different offices within the division; a series of how-to guides breaking down how to navigate the Hub, use Workday, and set up email signatures, voicemails and call forwarding; and other general and division-specific tasks new hires need to complete to get set up.

Rollins’ experience with teaching allows her to have a different perspective on challenges most others may find hindering.

“I have a slightly different outlook on challenging situations,” Rollins said. “Teaching rewired my brain to solve concurrent problems quickly.”

Business supports are critical to the agency’s success, and Rollins takes pride in knowing her work keeps the agency moving.

“We are the glue that holds everything together,” she said.