Nikki Gogan completed her Diploma with WCPT in 2017. We sat down with her to find out why she chose the WCPT Diploma and what her study has done for her real estate career.
Nikki was always motivated to study for her Diploma – overwhelmingly, out of a commitment to the real estate industry and her aspirations within it.
“I felt a responsibility to get my Diploma. To myself and to the industry I was working in”, Nikki said. 
Nikki has built her entire working life around real estate, having kicked off her career when she was just 15 in a Saturday administration role at her local agency. From there, Nikki worked her way through property management and then sales in Northam, east of Perth. Once she reached her mid-twenties, with a decade of real estate experience already under her belt, Nikki felt a nagging urge to study – both for her own, and her industry’s, benefit.
“After selling for 5 or 6 years, I was thinking – ‘why don’t I have it?’. So much of what we need to know we are learning operationally – this was about formalising that knowledge,” Nikki explains.
Nikki’s Diploma study evolved with her career, offering her immense flexibility to shift her focus with her career aspirations.
“When I think about when I first started to talking to (WCPT CEO) Jackie about getting my Diploma – and compare this to when I finished it – I was at a completely different place. My life had changed significantly.”
Eventually, when the time came to transition from Northam to Perth, Nikki credits her Diploma for providing her with the self-assurance to join high-profile agency Caporn Young, despite being a Perth novice.
“I was constructing the career I wanted and speaking to high performers in Perth gave me enormous confidence. There were agents who wrote incredible numbers in real estate terms, but I had higher qualifications than them. I knew what I was talking about despite being a little fish in a big pond.
Nikki used her own high customer service standards as a template for selecting a training provider – which for her, made WCPT an obvious choice.
“I really appreciated the fact that the business was family owned and run and Jackie was the face of the company. If I had questions or queries, she was a real person and I could run things past her and ask her questions. This is the expectation of me as an agent in the market, so that is how I related the industry I was in to the training I wanted to do”, Nikki said.
“Real estate comes back to being personal and the way that people can make other people feel. I used the same process I would use if I was selling my house- that idea of putting my biggest asset in someone else’s hands: it’s a big deal.”
While Nikki agrees that there was never necessarily a perfect time to start her Diploma, the WCPT format gave her the flexibility she needed to fit her study around her work.
“There is always something to do, there is always something else to turn my attention to – knowing I could leave the classroom with a lesson ticked off was actually a low level impact on my week – and having flexibility was awesome, in the event that I did need to change something”, Nikki said.
“I wanted to get it done and was motivated to do it, but there was still no pressure – we all need to sell houses and Jackie understood that. I put timeframes around things and she made sure I stuck to it. She created that structure and deadlines for me. She held me accountable to what I wanted to achieve.”
It was this partnership to getting the Diploma completed – in a personalised and professionally-relevant way – that has delivered Nikki the confidence to pursue the next phase of her real estate career.
“What we do is all about self-confidence and belief in myself – and that is what the Diploma has given me more than anything else. I don’t necessarily see myself running a company in the shorter term, but it is such an awesome tool to have. And who knows where it will go!”
Find out more about the Diploma of Property Services here