Rebekah Hein

About Rebekah Hein

As a first-generation college student, my journey toward building a professional career has been anything but linear. Confronted with many exciting career paths and a slew of new opportunities, I quickly found myself overwhelmed and naïve in my assumption that I could navigate college with ease. I decided I would become a U.S. diplomat and fulfill a lifelong dream of working in international affairs. Leaning into a full course load during my first semester at American University, I soon realized I was struggling, and my heart just wasn’t in the coursework. I ended that first semester with the daunting realization that I needed to reconsider my academic path and maybe even my chosen school of study. I was left with the sinking feeling that maybe I didn’t have what it took to be a professional after all.In my second semester, I had the privilege of taking an international development course that exposed me to the role of education and capacity-building from a global perspective. With every hour of lecture, my professional path became clearer and clearer, until I finally reached my “aha moment.” When I imagined my future, I saw myself working with professionals around the world, designing and implementing impactful trainings and capacity-building activities to meet our world’s most critical needs and tackle its biggest challenges. Through education, I could marry everything that interested me about diplomacy with the practical skills I knew I was good at.Today, with more than seven years of experience working in international development, education, and data literacy, I have partnered with a wide range of stakeholders, including the U.S. Government, nonprofits, and private-sector organizations. I specialize in data literacy and application, program management, and training design and implementation. Through my work, I focus on developing and delivering demand-driven training programs that blend technical knowledge with adult learning frameworks to drive impact. In tandem, I lead the development of learning strategies and data collection activities to assess the impact and return on training initiatives in alignment with strategic capacity-building and learning goals. I also support the integration of continuous improvement practices and data-driven decision-making around learning. My experience spans sectors and technical areas, including land and natural resource governance, women’s economic empowerment and gender, urban development, biodiversity conservation, climate, geopolitics, semiconductors and AI, and more.

Experience

1. Director of Content

   Plan Forward

   Mar 2025 — Present · Washington, DC, US

   Develops content, manages a team of consultants, and oversees the training and retention of Insight Specialists to meet client deliverable demands for action-oriented research reports in collaboration with the Director of Research and CEO.

Education

• American University

  Bachelor's degree, International/Global Studies

  2015 — 2019

• American University

  Master of Arts - MA, International Training and Education

  2018 — 2019

• Jagiellonian University

  Semester Exchange

  2017 — 2017