Gretchen Sullivan
Gretchen Sullivan is a senior technical assistance consultant in the Workforce Program Area at AIR. She has over 20 years of experience in the public workforce development system, spanning work at the federal, state, and regional/local levels. In her role at AIR, she works closely with state and regional/local clients, such as state workforce agencies and state and local workforce development boards, to deliver training, technical assistance, coaching, and resource development to support innovation and continuous improvement in the workforce system.
Sullivan's areas of subject matter expertise include customer-centered design, workforce service delivery assessment and redesign, system and service delivery integration, career pathways development and education and training alignment, development of high-impact workforce boards, and business engagement and industry sector partnership and strategy development. Sullivan’s key areas of practice include partnership development, strategic planning, customer journey mapping, process mapping, training and facilitation design and delivery, and development of diverse tools and resources for workforce system staff and customers.
Prior to AIR’s acquisition of Maher & Maher in 2020, Sullivan had worked as a senior consultant with Maher since 2007. She also worked for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (USDOL-ETA) from 1997 to 2007 in increasingly senior roles. These roles included serving as a federal project officer for several formula- and competitively-funded state and local grantees, providing technical assistance to ensure compliant grant oversight and operations and effective service design and delivery. For USDOL-ETA, Sullivan also oversaw innovative, public-private industry sector partnership development efforts; served as a liaison with other federal agencies to support domestic violence survivors participating in welfare-to-work programs; and ultimately supervised a team responsible for policy development and technical assistance for Workforce Investment Act Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, Wagner-Peyser Act Employment Service programs, and other key programs.
