Who You’re Working With
Craig von Collenberg
Founder and Principal Consultant
I started my career as a sheet metal worker. Five years of apprenticeship, early mornings, working with my hands, and learning a trade alongside people who took real pride in what they built. That experience didn't just shape my resume, it shaped how I think about education, opportunity, and what it actually means to help someone get somewhere.
From there, my path has been anything but straight. Community college instructor. Apprenticeship director. State workforce director. Higher education system leader. National workforce strategy lead at AWS. Now, founder of my own consulting practice. I've sat at a lot of different tables… and that's exactly the point.
At Ruedt Strategies, I work with colleges, companies, and workforce organizations that are trying to close the gap between learning and work. Not in theory. In practice — with real institutions, real constraints, and real people who need a clear path forward. My role is usually to be the person in the room who can translate: what the employer actually needs, what the college can realistically deliver, what the data says about where the market is going, and what it will take to actually build something that lasts.
Most recently, I led national skills-based education and workforce strategy for Amazon Web Services, working with more than 100 colleges and 80 employer partners to build early-career tech talent pipelines. Before that, I directed Nevada's Governor's Office of Workforce Innovation and led workforce development for the Nevada System of Higher Education. The work has always been the same at its core: help good-faith partners stop talking past each other and start building something real.
I hold a Master's in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling and a Bachelor's in Labor Education, which tells you something about what I think matters. The strategy is only as good as the people it reaches.
If you're building an education-to-workforce initiative, designing a new partnership, or trying to figure out where to start, that's where I tend to be most useful.