Pamela Mankoff is an instructional designer, manager, and technical writer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency with more than 15 years of expertise in disaster and emergency medical preparedness and leadership development. Since 2016, she has overseen mandatory training completion for FEMA employees and contractors, including ensuring employee engagement, editing department newsletters and other communiques, and participating in working groups for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to create and assess training curricula. She credits her career to her upbringing and background as much as her tenacity and sense of humor. Raised in a large family by parents who often struggled to put all of their children through school, Ms. Mankoff was inspired by the hard work and consistency that they modeled.
Ms. Mankoff got her start serving in the United States military during the first Gulf War, and continued her education at Wayland Baptist University, earning a bachelor’s degree in medical technology and business administration in 1996. Before beginning her career in technical writing, she spent several years as a teacher, trainer and instructor. She frequently found herself modifying the lessons she was given in order to make them more easily understandable, and soon secured a position with a company that specialized in building digital training courses to ship overseas for soldiers and sailors to use. By the early 2000s, Ms. Mankoff had shifted her focus to technical writing and course design, joining Ciber as a technical writer through 2004 before spending the next two years as an in-house subject matter expert for Unisys.
Between 2007 and 2012, Ms. Mankoff was a trainer and instructional designer for LGB & Associates, departing to accept positions as a senior instructional designer for TEKSystems and a project lead and technical adviser at Xenia Systems, LLC. Her diverse experience in military, corporate, and technological training and curriculum design led her to her current role with FEMA in 2016. She is proud to be a veteran and considers the hard work and clear vision that brought her success in her career to be among her greatest accomplishments. She hopes to remain active with FEMA’s reserve corps in the coming years as she begins to work toward retirement, and is an active donor and volunteer with the Wounded Warriors Project, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation.
Ms. Mankoff advises others that the key to success is to have clear goals and clear strategies for accomplishing them, even if those goals change over time. She is the proud parent of three adult children, a grandmother of four, and a great-grandmother to one, and feels that having raised a family is one of her most impressive feats. Ms. Mankoff emphasizes that she has dedicated her entire life to helping others, going above and beyond as a veteran, a teacher, and in her other service.