Katherine Metres Akbar is the founder and president of Your Edge for Success YES, one of Washington metro’s two top-rated career success companies. Providing job search services, she and her team have helped over 5,600 people perfect their resumes, master networking, get interviews, and receive offers. As a speaker, Ms. Akbar has been featured on career success topics, entrepreneurship, corporate wellness, and civil rights by the Foreign Service Institute, United Nations, Channel 7 News, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Washington Accueil Association, Prince William County, Washington Housing Conservancy, and many others. She is a communications guru with two awards for her writing and one for oratory who is adept at crisis management, like when she put on an international experts’ meeting in Amman after the 2005 triple terrorist bombing.

She and her partner are Certified Talent Optimization Consultants, providing Predictive Index personality testing, consulting, and workshops on understanding and managing conflict with people of other brain types. They are also Certified Professional Career Coaches working on certificates for executive, organizational development, and life coaching. She previously served as a U.S. diplomat and executive director of a civil rights non-profit. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, and certificates from Toastmasters and the National Speakers Association. The daughter of two clinical psychologists and a lifelong devotee of personal development, Ms. Akbar has mastered the arts of mindset, leadership, goal setting, and accountability with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and decade-long plans and visions.