As Director of Workforce Strategy for the Partnership for Economic Innovation (PEI) and Pipeline AZ, Katherine Pappas focuses on creating and managing the strategic partnerships and education initiatives of Pipeline AZ, a 501c3. Pipeline AZ serves as Arizona's statewide career exploration platform and collective infrastructure. Through enhancing existing efforts and connecting key relationships, Pipeline AZ is demonstrating how technology can innovate workforce and education partnerships and build resilient talent pipelines for Arizona.  Today, Katherine is leading many education and career efforts that help position Pipeline AZ to achieve its mission of helping Arizona students find careers and the education that they need to get there. Pipeline AZ serves as a holistic approach to career planning, exploration and navigation from Middle School to Post Secondary through customized portals and experiences for student users. Katherine partners with stakeholders to provide equitable and consistent career planning experiences.   As the liaison between educational clients, corporate and business leaders, Katherine has both an empathetic and a tactical understanding of translating and connecting talent requirements of the partners in our local market because of her experience in workforce solutions, talent development and higher education.    Katherine spent over 14 years designing education and talent strategies within Apollo Education Group. As an executive leader, she launched and implemented a national enterprise-wide business-to-business division to attract new growth and designing just in time training service solutions for sector specific clients to address both local and national skills gaps by industry and pathway solutions. Now she is a part of supporting and leveraging a scalable framework that fulfills the needs of all community stakeholders in Arizona.   Katherine earned her dual Bachelor of Consumer Behavior and International Business Administration degree from the University of Arizona. She also earned her Masters of Business Administration/GM from University of Phoenix. She was born and raised in Carmel, Indiana and currently resides in Phoenix and enjoys wellness, cooking, outdoor and creative design endeavors.