Current Position and Past Experience
Bridgett Strickler currently serves as Senior Partner, Adult Learner Engagement and Impact at the Center for Academic Innovation, a national nonprofit where she leads work focused on elevating adult learner voice and using storytelling to inform how institutions understand, engage, and support adult learners.
Bridgett has played a key role in launching adult learner engagement campaigns across the country, partnering with state and regional leaders to stand up and support large-scale initiatives in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington. Her work has helped connect tens of thousands of adults to education pathways and workforce opportunities that align with their goals.
In November 2025, Bridgett delivered a TEDx talk in New York City at TEDxWomen, If You’re Going Back to School, Community May Be the Medicine. Through her TED talk and her storytelling work, she is helping bring visibility and dignity to adult learners by sharing their powerful comeback stories and spotlighting the barriers and breakthroughs on the road to education and career transformation.
Bridgett is also the co-author, with Dr. Matt Bergman, of Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us, published in 2026. The book brings together the stories of 50 adult learners whose journeys illuminate what it takes to return to education while navigating work, family, financial pressures, and lives that rarely follow a straight line. Their stories challenge conventional narratives about persistence and resilience while showing how identity, belonging, institutional support, and the recognition of prior experience can shape an adult learner’s path to completion. Fifty percent of proceeds from the book support scholarships for adult learners through the Center for Academic Innovation.
Previously, Bridgett was Vice President of Coalition Strategy at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), where she led CAEL’s long-standing national partnerships with the energy and telecommunications sectors through the Energy Providers Coalition for Education (EPCE) and the National Alliance for Communications Technology, Education and Learning (NACTEL). In that role, she developed and advanced scalable workforce-education strategies designed to drive economic mobility for adult learners and incumbent workers.
Prior to CAEL, she served as Chief Strategy Officer at The Graduate! Network (TGN), where she co-created employer engagement strategies that reached nearly 4,000 businesses and more than 6,000 workers nationwide. She also led research, learning, and impact efforts that helped shift the narrative around adult learners and their potential.
Education, Honors and Achievements
Bridgett holds a B.A. from Bucknell University in Economics and International Relations, a master’s degree in Secondary Education and Teaching from the University of Louisville, and an Executive MBA from the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky.
Personal Details and Community Involvement
Bridgett enjoys home entertaining, participating in community events as well as swimming, walking, jogging, and hiking in her free time with her husband, Stuart. Together they have two daughters, two cats, and two grand-cats. She also serves as a mentor for adult learners and recent graduates at one of her alma maters, University of Louisville.
