Joy King
Joy King is an enterprise executive and organizational transformation leader with more than two decades of experience spanning education, nonprofit leadership, workforce development, and entrepreneurship. She currently serves as Chief Talent, Strategy, and Operations Officer at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), where she leads enterprise-wide strategy, talent systems, operational infrastructure, and organizational alignment. In this role, she works closely with executive leadership and the board to strengthen institutional performance, modernize systems, and ensure people, processes, and technology are aligned with long-term mission impact.
Alongside her executive leadership work, she is the Founder of Lifestyles by Joy and Suite Life Business Coaching, where she supports individuals, founders, CEOs, and leadership teams in building clarity, alignment, and sustainable growth. Her work focuses on executive coaching, organizational design, leadership development, and systems transformation, with an emphasis on helping leaders navigate complexity while strengthening culture, decision-making, and performance. She is also a frequent speaker on workforce strategy, leadership in disruption, and the intersection of human systems and technology.
Joy began her career as a high school English and Japanese teacher in Chicago Public Schools, where she taught for over a decade before transitioning into nonprofit and national-level organizational leadership roles in Washington, DC. She holds a Master’s degree in Educational Administration from Governors State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education from DePaul University. Over the course of her career, she has combined education, operations, and executive leadership to build systems that support people and organizations at scale while advancing equity, access, and sustainable impact.
• Certified Workplace Wellness and Mental Health Strategist
• Professional Trainer
• Preparing for Executive Leadership
• Type 75 Administrative Certificate
• Type 9 Secondary Education
• Organizational Development Professional
• Governors State University - M.A.
• Trauma informed Foundation
• National Council of Negro Women, Inc. HQ
• Charter Board Partners
• National Association of Professional Women (NAPW)
• The Trauma-Conscious Equity Foundation
What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to following my intuition and not being afraid to ask for what I want. I think especially for women, we are guided, voluntold, and pushed in directions that don't necessarily feel authentic to us. One of the things I've been really successful at is just following my intuition and not being afraid to say what I want. The job I have now, even within NCAN, really came out of a conversation I had with myself, some journaling, to say, where do I see myself? I wasn't a chief before, so it took audacity to think that I could be one. I wanted to take the best parts of all of the work that I had done in the past and craft it into a job, and I was able to do exactly that. When I started my business, I was laid off during the pandemic, and it was an opportunity to try something new. I started my business probably not in the way any professional would tell you to do it, but I just took a leap and I bet on myself, and it's done really well. No one's gonna believe in you more than you, and you kind of sometimes just have to take the leap and follow your intuition.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Never be afraid to just really ask for what you want. I think especially for women, we are guided, we're voluntold, we are pushed in directions that don't necessarily feel authentic to us. One of the things that I've been really successful at, or I attribute my success to, is just following my intuition and not being afraid to say what I want. The job that I have now, even within NCAN, really came out of a conversation I had with myself, some journaling, to say, where do I see myself? I wasn't a chief before, so it took audacity to think that I could be one. I just wanted to take the best parts of all of the work that I had done in the past and craft it into a job, and I was able to do exactly that. When I started my business, I was laid off during the pandemic, and it was an opportunity to try something new. I started my business probably not in the way any professional would tell you to do it, but I just took a leap and I bet on myself, and it's done really well. So I think that's really the advice: no one's gonna believe in you more than you, and you kind of sometimes just have to take the leap and follow your intuition.
Locations
National College Attainment Network (NCAN)
Springdale, MD 20774