Heather McKay
Senior vice president of employer engagement and executive director of the Strada Institute for the Future of Work
Heather McKay is Strada’s senior vice president of employer engagement and executive director of Strada Institute for the Future of Work.
McKay’s career has spanned a wide range of education and workforce development topics, including educational alignment with the labor market, career and technical education, transfer pathways, prior learning assessment, nondegree credentials, STEM programs, work-based learning, career coaching and navigation, student decision-making and major choice, workforce development systems and funding, and performance-based funding models for higher education.
At the Virginia Office of Education Economics, McKay developed the Virginia Skills Initiative, a dataset designed to help the state understand where Virginia graduates end up and what skills they possess. She also coordinated the state’s $1 billion Tech Talent Investment Program, a nationally recognized endeavor that is building a pipeline of graduates skilled for the tech workforce. McKay and the VOEE team also developed dashboards and data visualizations to make state and regional education and labor market data available to practitioners and policymakers. Previously, McKay was the founding director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University’s School of Labor and Management Relations.
McKay earned a Master of Science and a Master of Arts from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as well as a Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College.