Effective communication helps build strong workplaces, and Rachel Wolford’s mission is to help organizations prevent workplace violence by developing a healthy, psychologically safe culture. Rachel’s career conducting research and crafting client-focused training deliverables has spanned academia and industry. She excels at digging into cutting-edge research and best practices in workplace violence prevention, synthesizing content for live and e-learning training courses, needs assessment reports, thought leadership, blog posts, newsletters, playbooks and case studies. Rachel identifies relevant research in workforce violence prevention, counter-insider threat, active assailant response, de-escalation and domestic violence and specializes in creating educational materials tailored specifically for each client served by the Workforce Risk Management team.
Prior to joining Sikich, Rachel was a communications specialist, content creator, and learning & development consultant at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At these institutions, Rachel collaborated with scientists and engineers to develop journal articles, proposals, white papers and presentations, helping her clients successfully publish their research, win proposal funding and champion their research goals to stakeholders. Rachel was also an English professor at Texas Tech University and the University of Minnesota Duluth for eight years, teaching courses in Technical Communication and Rhetoric to graduate and undergraduate students. She also owns a small consulting firm creating one-of-a-kind research projects for organizations.
Education
- PhD in Rhetoric and Professional Communication, Iowa State University
- Master of Art, Teaching English as a Second Language, Iowa State University
- Bachelor of Arts, English, Cedarville University
Affiliations
- Association of Threat Assessment Professionals