Discover how Sara leveraged hands-on experience from emergency response to build a career in leadership development.
Sara’s career has never followed a traditional path, but one thing has remained constant: her passion for helping people learn, grow, and succeed. Today, she works as a leadership and organizational development professional, designing programs that help leaders build stronger teams and workplace cultures. Her journey began in healthcare and emergency response, where she worked as an EMT and taught CPR, anatomy, and emergency response skills. Those experiences taught her an important lesson that still guides her work today: learning is most powerful when it’s practical, memorable, and ready to be applied when it matters most.
Although Sara attended college studying psychology, she did not complete her degree. Instead, she built her career through hands-on experience, professional certifications, and a commitment to continuous learning. Along the way, she moved into corporate training, leadership development, and organizational development roles across multiple industries. Like many STARs, Sara has encountered the paper ceiling. Despite leading enterprise-wide leadership programs, coaching senior leaders, and driving large-scale learning initiatives, she has often faced degree requirements and automated screening systems that overlook proven experience and capability. Rather than letting those barriers define her, Sara continued investing in her skills, building expertise through real-world leadership, facilitation, coaching, and professional development.
A turning point came when an HR leader at TCF Bank recognized her potential and hired her as a Leadership Development Trainer. That opportunity allowed Sara to build leadership programs from the ground up and showed her that her greatest strength wasn’t simply teaching—it was creating the conditions for others to succeed. Today, she helps organizations develop stronger leaders while advocating for a broader definition of talent and potential. Her story reflects the experience of many STARs: degrees can be valuable, but they are not the only measure of a person's ability to contribute, lead, and succeed. As Sara reminds others, you don’t need every opportunity—you just need the right one.
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