Francine Parham is a career expert and practitioner focused on female leadership and the advancement of women and women of color in the workplace. Having spent two decades in the corporate sector advancing to the position of a global vice-president at General Electric and Johnson and Johnson, she understands the importance of this work.

She is currently the Founder and CEO of FrancineParham & Co., a professional development company focused helping organizations and their female talent with career advancement. Francine is the creator of the Sharpen Your Skills Professional™, a series of career development learning programs focused on the right skills (explicit and implicit) women and women of color need for their professional success and advancement. Her company also works with organizations to provide quantitative and qualitative assessments with recommended approaches and solutions to advance their professional women and women of color in the workplace.

Francine is a keynote and public speaker. She has written for various online platforms and has been cited or recognized as a career expert in various published books. Her most recently published book, Please Sit Over There: How to Manage Power, Overcome Exclusion and Succeed as a Black Woman at Work (Berrett-Koehler Publishers I Penguin Random House Distributors) will be available globally, August, 2022. Francine is a Senior Fellow at The Conference Board, a business memberdriven global think tank and is cited as a Women’s Media Center expert.

Francine holds two master's degrees. She graduated from Columbia University with her Masters of Science degree in Journalism as a Stabile Investigative Fellow. Her second degree is from the University of Illinois where she obtained her Masters of Arts degree in Labor and Industrial Relations. Her undergraduate degree is from Purdue University where she double-majored in Business Communications and Psychology.

Tony Buffum is Vice President of HR Client Strategy at Upwork, where he is responsible for helping accelerate the growth of enterprise companies, helping them solve HR challenges related to finance, procurement and talent transformation. Tony brings over two decades of experience leading global HR teams as well as driving transformational change in company culture, organizational design, performance management, and employee integration and engagement. He joins Upwork following a series of leadership positions including chief human resources officer (CHRO) at FLIR Systems, VP of global human resources at STANLEY Security and VP of human resources at Stanley Black & Decker.

Mary V. L. Wright leads one of the SHRM Foundation’s four pillars of work: Skill Building - Preparing People for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Workplaces.  A critical part of that effort is leading the implementation of the US DOL funded HR Registered Apprenticeship Program, the first national HR apprenticeship program. As such, she is responsible for all parts of the program – development, marketing, sales, budget and evaluation.  In addition, she leads the Foundation’s work on the role of credentials in achieving an organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion goals and is an integral part of the team in promoting the inclusion of untapped talent in the workforce.

Ms. Wright has many years of experience connecting the public and private sectors in municipal finance, government affairs, and workforce development as a project leader, facilitator and subject matter expert.

Previously, Ms. Wright was a director at Jobs for the Future (JFF) where she designed and supervised the completion of foundation, government and employer-funded projects on topics including: expanding employability skills, developing apprenticeship and work-based learning strategies, utilizing labor market information to determine educational focus, better hiring and training practices for people with disabilities, improving entry level jobs for the retail sector, determining the correct educational focus for specific geographic areas including the state of Florida and Columbus Ohio, and an in-depth analysis of green infrastructure jobs.

Prior to joining JFF, she served as director at The Conference Board in New York City, driving its work in workforce readiness, business, and education partnerships. She also focused on improving the employment outcomes for people with disabilities through research and convenings. Ms. Wright co-authored or acted as project director on several key Conference Board reports regarding workforce readiness skills, including Are They Really Ready to Work? and The Ill-Prepared Workforce.

She serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Work & the Economy and the Fort Myers Beach Community Foundation.

Ms. Wright received a Master of Business Administration in public/nonprofit management from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Affairs from Connecticut College.

Cassie currently leads Workforce Development Partnerships for the Google Career Certificates. This program helps job seekers -- regardless of their educational background and work experience - learn the skills they need to enter in-demand high-growth career fields that pay well. Prior to this role, Cassie served as the Product Lead for the second most popular certificate on Coursera: The Google Project Management Certificate. 

During her tenure at Google, Cassie has led Strategy and Operations for Grow with Google & Waze. She also served as an Account Strategist for small businesses using Google AdWords and Analytics to grow their presence. 

She is currently pursuing her Executive MBA at NYU Stern School of Business.

Karen Worthy enjoys solving the most challenging problems in the industry and is known for her ability to make difficult problems seem simple. As VP of Talent Acquisition and Employee Experience at Booster, she leads a team that is revolutionizing how the industry hires for both field workers and corporate employees. With Booster’s accelerated growth trajectory, her team has mastered high volume recruiting in hard-to-fill roles such as CDL truck drivers. 

Karen is a self-proclaimed data geek, an engineering and business graduate, and a mom of three amazing boys. Her resume boasts companies such as Amazon and Procter & Gamble, which have prepared her for her role leading change and growth within the startup world of Booster.

Nancy Woolever, SHRM-SCP, joined SHRM in 1997 to plan SHRM’s conference, seminar, e-learning and executive education programs. In 2006, she began leading SHRM’s academic initiative to raise HR educational standards and led the test development and administration of SHRM’s student capstone exam before joining the certification team as director of exam development in 2017. In 2019, Ms. Woolever became the vice president of certification operations as overall product and project owner with responsibility for exam development, certificant care and testing administration. Before joining SHRM, Ms. Woolever held various management positions in industry and academia. Her specialty areas are test development, training and development.  Ms. Woolever holds a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s in HR both from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.