From Teller to Teacher to Interim CFO
For years, Kim Forbes watched the people she trained get promoted into jobs she knew she could do.
She had the experience.
She had the knowledge.
She had earned the respect of her colleagues.
What she didn't have was the credential.
Working in banking throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kim became known as someone who learned quickly, mastered new responsibilities, and helped others succeed. She regularly invested in continuing education courses, often paying for them herself simply because she loved learning. Yet each promotion seemed to stop at the same invisible barrier.
The people she mentored advanced.
She remained behind.
Eventually, the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Without a college degree, there was a ceiling on what experience alone could accomplish.
In 2001, Kim decided to return to college while working full-time and raising her family.
It was one of the hardest seasons of her life.
Her days belonged to work. Evenings belonged to class. Weekends disappeared into assignments, projects, and studying. At the same time, her family faced painful challenges when her children left high school before graduating. Rather than weakening her resolve, the experience strengthened it.
She wanted her children to see someone refuse to quit.
Education had never been modeled in her own family. As a first-generation high school graduate, college felt unfamiliar territory. At Guilford College, she found something she hadn't expected—a community that believed she belonged. She became active in the adult student government, eventually serving as president, while professors and classmates encouraged her through the demands of balancing work, family, and school.
When she earned her bachelor's degree in 2003, she expected a sense of completion.
Instead, she discovered something far more significant.
Learning had become part of who she was.
The degree didn't satisfy her curiosity. It awakened it.
Kim left banking to pursue another lifelong aspiration: teaching. She earned a Master of Arts in Teaching, spent more than a decade in middle and high school classrooms, moved into district leadership, served as a consultant during the pandemic, and eventually completed her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction.
Today, as the Interim Chief Financial Officer for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Kim brings together every chapter of her journey. Her years in banking, her experience as an educator, and her district leadership all converge in a role that allows her to serve students and schools from a new perspective.
Looking back, she no longer sees disconnected careers.
She sees preparation.
Nothing was wasted.
The greatest evidence of that transformation may be found at home.
Watching their mother persist through college changed what Kim's children believed was possible for themselves. All three eventually returned to complete high school or earn their GEDs before continuing on to earn postsecondary degrees of their own.
"Education changes more than careers," Kim says. "It changes what families believe is possible."
Her journey reminds us that the most powerful impact of adult education is rarely confined to the individual earning the diploma. When one person has the courage to begin again, they often rewrite the expectations of an entire family. Sometimes the first step toward changing generations is simply deciding that your own story isn't finished yet.
Kim Forbes is one of fifty adult learners featured in Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us. Read her complete story in her own words, and discover what these remarkable comebacks teach us, in the book from the Center for Academic Innovation.