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Karen Feltes is senior vice president of human resources and corporate secretary for Avista Corp. Previously, Feltes served as the senior director of corporate human resources and general services for Avista. Prior to that, she held the positions of human resources business partner and diversity manager.
Feltes is an accomplished human resources professional, with a 20-year career spanning the breadth of domestic and international human resource issues in both the public and private sectors. She has extensive experience in strategic planning, leadership and organizational development, employee relations, benefits design, executive compensation, recruitment, and program/policy design and implementation. She joined Avista in 1998. Feltes’ human resource experience also includes corporate leadership positions at Microsoft, King County government and Federated Department Stores, where she created, managed and implemented human resource programs.
At Microsoft, Feltes headed up the strategic planning and development group, which was responsible for human resource programs and plans affecting 18,000 employees in locations throughout the world. During her last two years at Microsoft, Feltes was promoted into a senior management role in international human resources, where she had oversight responsibility for tax, compensation and benefits plans, as well as general human resource programs for subsidiary locations in 46 countries. She was also a member of Microsoft’s mergers and acquisitions team.
In addition to her broad human resources experience, Feltes holds a master’s degree in business administration from City University of Seattle. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in communications from the University of Washington. Feltes has also taught human resource strategy and other management courses as an adjunct instructor locally, as well as internationally. | 