Meet Your Young Professional Steering Committee Member: Katie Knaeble
Katie is a case manager at the Vermont Department of Labor Workforce Development Division. She assists job seekers with the job search process, creating resumes, assessing interests and referring to partner agencies as necessary. She also manages a federal training program that assists low income and dislocated workers pay for traditional classroom training and/or access on-the-job training. Since 2016, Katie has been a part of BDCC’s Southern Vermont Young Professional Steering Committee.
Katie grew up in Vermont and considers Rutland County “home”. She graduated both high school and college from the Rutland County region but after college wanted a change of scenery and moved to Boston for graduate school. Katie spent three years living the city life and decided she was ready to move back to the country. Katie ended up moving to Greenfield, MA where she fell in love with the rolling hills and the luscious river valley. After relocating, she was happy to find employment in Brattleboro and has been working in Southern Vermont for the past 5 years. Katie will always consider herself a Vermonter at heart and feels very connected to the Vermont way of life as a member of the workforce community. To Katie, the most SoVermont thing is that walking down a dirt road here, every person that drives past you waves hello, even if you’ve never seen them before.
When asked about the biggest opportunity she sees in SoVermont for young professionals, Katie stated “Southern Vermont is a great place to live or work. There are countless job opportunities and employers are seeking young people that want to learn and grow with their businesses and bring a fresh perspective. Southern Vermont is a vibrant, quirky and fun community.”
Want to know some fun facts about Katie? She lives by the motto to work hard during the week and play harder on the weekends. Most weekends she spends playing outside and exploring the mountains across the Northeast. She is an avid hiker and loves to camp year round. Her main hiking partner is Knox, a lab-pittie rescue that she adopted last fall. Katie also spends a lot of her free time working on Knox’s trail manners and helping him overcome his fear of strangers and other dogs. Additionally, she enjoys giving back to the community through volunteering at a dog shelter in Western Massachusetts.
If that’s not hard-core enough, Katie is a registered member of the White Mountain 4000 Footer Club; she hiked all 48 peaks of New Hampshire with a 4000+ foot elevation in less than 8 months which totaled 261 miles and 142 hours of hiking. She has also hiked all the 4000 footers of Vermont and is now working on her New England 67 list, which leaves her the mountains of Maine.
Interested in learning more about Katie? If you don’t want to catch her at the top of one of the mountains she visits every weekend, come by one of our YP events!
