Dr. Nancy Latham currently serves as the Executive Director of the Council of Teacher Education and a Research Associate Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). For the past ten years she has served as a lead consultant on state-wide early childhood employment pathway efforts in Illinois and teacher preparation pathway competency development and implementation. Dr. Latham has published and presented extensively on teacher attrition, specifically the impacts of teacher preparation model on teacher persistence in the field and co-authored and edited Voices from the Field: Collaborative Innovations in Early Childhood Educator Preparation (Bernoteit, Darragh Ernst, & Latham, 2016) which overviews the state-wide experience of competency implementation for early childhood credentialing in Illinois.Prior to joining UIUC she served as an administrator and Early Childhood Professor at Illinois State University. In addition, she was a tenured community college professor and a public-school teacher and administrator. Her external leadership has included serving as President of the Illinois Association of Early Childhood Teacher Education and representing the public university colleges of education on the Illinois State Educator Professional Licensure Board (SEPLB). She is currently leading an Illinois State Board of Education project to revise the state teaching standards to a competency-based system. Her research interests focus on teacher employment pathways and trends, teacher persistence in the field, and the impacts of teacher preparation models and practices on teacher retention and attrition. Dr. Johnna Darragh Ernst is a Distinguished Professor of Early Childhood Education at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois. For the past several years, her work has focused on collaboratively developing competency-based pathways supporting early childhood practitioners in Illinois and servi