In my current role as Executive Director of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation (OWINN), I work with a wide array of stakeholders to create a skilled, diverse, aligned, and integrated workforce system. We develop statewide strategies to ensure that employers can recruit Nevadans with 21st century job skills that are needed in the labor market. One way we do this is by working with K–12 and postsecondary education institutions, state agencies, and employers to create career pathways for students in critical fields such as education, technology, health care, and advanced manufacturing.

Being an education leader has always meant doing whatever it takes to remove the barriers students face in living productive and meaningful lives. In the classroom, I leveraged student achievement data to deliver better instruction for my students; similarly, at OWINN, I leverage labor market data and research to inform workforce policies with the goal of increasing families’ household incomes.

I decided to pursue my current career because I knew that household income was the strongest variable that predicted students’ success. I wanted to work on policies that enabled individuals to gain the skills necessary to enter meaningful careers and increase their household income. Household financial stability means that many of the difficult external barriers that my students faced before they even stepped foot into my classroom could be mitigated. Additionally, when I was a classroom teacher I noticed that when educators talked about “college and career readiness”, we rarely provided the same level of credibility, nuance, or attention to the “career” part of that statement and I wanted to help change that.

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