Dr. Kylie Taffard

PhD | 20+ Years in Education | Vocational Education & Training Researcher | Construction & Infrastructure Specialist | Q Methodology Expert | University of Canterbury

Kylie Taffard made a deliberate move from 20 years in the classroom to research, driven by a question she kept encountering in practice: why do some people never see certain careers as possible, and what would it actually take to change that? Her PhD at the University of Canterbury brought the rigour of formal research to that question, focusing on gender and occupational stereotypes, mentoring, and systems change in the construction and infrastructure sectors.

That combination, deep classroom experience plus doctoral research, gives her a dual lens that is rare. She understands how education actually functions from the inside: the informal pressures, the unspoken assumptions, the structures that quietly determine who ends up where. And she has the researcher's ability to identify the structural patterns behind those individual experiences.

Her expertise in Q Methodology, a research approach that explores how people think and prioritise, gives her an unusually rich toolkit for understanding subjective perspectives at scale. At academyEX, she brings all of that to the MCE programme, helping educators see and act on the structural dimensions of their work.