Sarah Michele King - PhD

I attribute my success to my passion for competency-based education and my commitment to helping schoolhouses adopt practical, performance-based teaching and assessment methods. I also credit my persistence in engaging skeptical participants in workshops, which has helped build trust and achieve measurable buy-in for meaningful change.

Don't give up on your dream. Let's plan a way forward. Having a mentor is important, especially in a male-dominated industry like the military. Even though women are coming up and we've got some top-notch women all over the place, it's still male-dominated, and women are not recognized as often as men are. At our awards ceremony yesterday, there were 12 categories and only 1 or 2 women won awards out of 12, while the rest were men. That shows you that women are still not being recognized the way they should be.

The first thing I would say is make sure this is what you want to do. Ensure this is the right path for you, because in 10 years, if you've went down that road and you decide it's not right, you're gonna have a major career shift, and it's hard to change. You don't want to be mediocre. You want to succeed, and I think that's important for women to succeed. So, to succeed, it's got to start at the basis and make sure it's the right career field. I see a lot of educators getting out of education because it was not the right career field. It was just that I needed to go to college, and my parents wanted me to do this, so I did what my parents wanted.

The biggest challenge has been getting buy-in from Air Force schoolhouses for competency-based education and training. When the program started in 2018, it wasn't mandated, it was just an option, but now all of a sudden it's been mandated and everything will be competency-based. The buy-in has been really difficult. We would get some people that were downright nasty about it, saying 'I'm not doing it, it's horrible.' It was up to me to get these people to buy in. When I'm in these workshops and I get these difficult people, I pay attention to them and make it my goal to ensure that they're completely understanding, because it's a passion for me to get our schoolhouses to do this. I see the benefit in it because traditionally, education has been instructor-led with students sitting in classrooms doing what the instructor says, and we've been graduating students who are not able to perform or master skills. With competencies, students have practical skills where as soon as they graduate, they know how to do things. The Air Force has historically invested all this money into students going to tech schools, some up to a year long, and they're getting to their first assignment not knowing how to do anything. With competencies, instead of changing a brake on a block in a class, they actually learn how to change the brake on the airplane, giving them practical skills they can use.

I'm very passionate about education and people learning, and learning to the best of their abilities. I think that's why I've been so successful with the competencies workshop. The key thing is getting help and having somebody say you don't have to live like this, let me help you find your path to be successful. I've got a passion for women and edifying women, and I think if more women would start edifying other women, especially young girls, we wouldn't have the hate among young girls that we have. We would have a woman community that supports each other and loves each other. Women are the backbone of the country. We have driven men to be successful, and now we need to take our rightful place. Women need to be recognized for what they're doing.