Job title: Chief executive New Zealand Qualifications Authority
In taking the top job at NZQA, the yardstick-keeper for most of the educational qualifications you can earn in New Zealand, Karen Van Rooyen has knitted together the two parallel strands of her career to date - education and government service.
Van Rooyen, 44,
trained as a physical education teacher at the University of Otago before her first job at Taita College. Her interest in special education led her to teaching at a school for dyslexics in the United States; on her return to New Zealand, she joined the Open Polytechnic.
Government work beckoned when Van Rooyen took a job managing the implementation of the $170 million Tainui settlement for the Office of Treaty Settlements in 1995. Jobs with the prison service and the Ministry of Maori Development, followed, before she joined NZQA in 2001 as deputy chief executive.
She became acting chief executive when the Authority was introducing the National Certificate of Educational Achievement.
The attraction of the role, says Van Rooyen, was because "I felt I could make a difference to learners. The NZQA is the glue that sticks some of the other pieces in the educational sector together."
