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Our consultants are all current business professionals, who have excelled in a competitive corporate, professional services or public sector environment. As such, their experience and knowledge is therefore current, and ‘up to date’. They each bring a unique and pragmatic flavour to their work, and are focussed on fully understanding the needs of our clients, and delivering the agreed objectives for each assignment. We as a business, operate an ‘open’ and collaborative Company culture. All our consultants therefore take full ownership of our ‘Company operating principles’ as shown on our Home page, so the quality of the service our clients receive is both high and consistent.
Below is our team of consultants, along with a brief summary of their experience.
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Jim Thomas
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Jim is one of two directors of People Development Works, and operates as a business consultant and a learning facilitator. Prior to setting up the company, Jim had 13 years of ‘blue chip’ corporate experience in the ‘food and drinks’ sector working for Coca Cola, of which the last four of these were as a Senior Manager. He has significant commercial, people and operational experience within the ‘fast moving consumer goods’ marketplace, across all key trade sectors. He spent his final two years at Coca Cola as the Business Unit Controller for the Tesco account and was highly successful at enhancing revenue and profit delivered from the account.
Over the last six years as a business and training consultant, Jim has developed further his passion for the development and coaching of people, and improving the business efficiencies and performances of our clients. He has a significant breadth of expertise, with a healthy mix of learned knowledge and pragmatic experience gained from performing at a senior level in a highly competitive business environment.
Jim lives in Nottingham, and has a wide range of leisure interests including writing and playing music, involvement with sports such as football, golf and motor sport, and spending time with his wife and two children. |
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Roger Harrison
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Roger is our Client Services Director, and is responsible for the day to day management and development of our client base, as well as the winning of new client business. Roger's broad experience also enables him to work on consultancy and design projects for our clients in support of our consultancy team.
Prior to working with PDW, Roger had 14 years of 'blue chip' corporate experience in a variety of markets and has held management positions with Marks & Spencer, Coca Cola, Glaxo Smithkline and latterly Planet Retail. Roger has significant commercial, account and operational experience within the manufacturing and retail sectors as a result of his career experience and is able to add significant value to our overall client aims of organisational improvement.
Roger lives in Nottingham and is a keen sportsman and particularly a follower of league football. |
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Elan Thomas
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Elan is one of two directors of People Development Works, and works as both a group facilitator and a consultant support to our team. Elan also is involved with the day to day managing and running of our meetings centre in Nottingham.
Prior to being involved in the creation of PDW, Elan had 11 years of 'blue chip' corporate experience in the 'consumer goods' sector where she held regional management positions at BAT and Coca Cola. She therefore has significant commercial, people and operational experience across the key trade sectors that include grocery, convenience and wholesale.
Elan is an excellent facilitator of groups and teams and adds much value to our clients in areas such as team away days and product design. Her excellent people management skills have been well recognised and continue to help us to build our business.
Elan lives in Nottingham, and is mother to Molly & Healey and enjoys travel, staying active and the social side of life. |
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Lynn Galletly
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Lynn has 14 years extensive experience of providing consultancy support and training delivery to a wide range of private and public sector organisations. Prior to this, Lynn worked as a specialist careers officer for both Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire County councils. Lynn is highly experienced in conducting diagnostic research and facilitating continuous improvement activity as a catalyst for change and performance improvement. She delivers a wide variety of generic workshops and certificated Management Development Programmes, as well as advising and assessing organisations for Investors in People and Business Excellence.
Lynn has a lively, outgoing and practical approach to improving organisational and individual client performance, and prides herself on strong communication and interpersonal skills in facilitating effective customer focused group and ‘one to one’ activity. She is strongly committed to enabling and motivating people (especially managers) to take responsibility for their own learning, development and improvement, and has a flexible, ‘can do’ attitude.
Lynn lives in Newark in Nottinghamshire, and makes time to Dance Salsa, Work Out and enjoy exotic holidays! |
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Andrew Whittaker
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Andrew is a training consultant and executive coach. After a varied career which has included the armed forces, sales, corporate account management and corporate training, Andrew is able to use much 'real life' experience in his work. He has that rare talent of connecting with people from all walks of life, and as a consequence, audiences large and small find it easy to 'learn' from his highly likeable style. He has spent time observing behaviour in various organisations which have included the Royal Air force, Neopost, Reading university and MCI to name a few. He has also spent his time learning about and researching leadership, team dynamics, people development, communication, human interaction and motivation.
Andrew is a certified trainer in the art and science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a master of Time Line Therapy and a qualified hypnotist. He is firmly rooted at the modern end of the personal development spectrum and is equally effective with group training or individual coaching.
Andrew's specialisms are those areas which require the effective communication with and the influencing of, others. These important characteristics cover so many business and personal skills including leadership and people management, conflict management, client/customer development and negotiation.
Andrew lives in north Nottinghamshire and has a young daughter, so spare time is rare. However, he does occasionally moonlight as a stand up comedian, which is a great release from the pressures of modern life. |
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Linda Stokes
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Linda is an experienced consultant and facilitator specialising in leadership and team development, behavioural and organisational change and executive coaching. Over the last seven years she has worked across a number of business sectors including financial services, information technology, professional services and the public sector.
Before working as a consultant Linda started her career in Human Resources in employee relations for a jewellery manufacturer in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. She then moved to Harrow to join Data Logic, part of the Raytheon group, and as the Divisional HR manager was involved in a range of people and business initiatives.
After undertaking an MA in Organisational Development at Kingston University, Linda realised her true passion lay in understanding and developing people's potential. She moved to London and worked for a city firm as Training Manager before moving into consultancy.
As a coach Linda has worked with many managers and high potential individuals with a strong focus on leadership, personal impact and influence. Linda enjoys working with individuals and teams and has designed and delivered a wide range of programmes including personal development, leadership and team development, sales and presentation skills. A modular leadership programme designed by Linda was nominated and won an award at the National Training Awards in 2002.
She is accredited to use a range of psychometric and 360 instruments and she is a qualified NLP practitioner.
Linda lives in Windsor, has a young family and enjoys tennis, reading and the newly acquired hobby of cycling en famille! |
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Paul Hessey
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Paul has worked for several years as a trainer, facilitator and roleplayer across a wide range of sectors including Financial Services, Retail, Manufacturing and Public Services. He specialises in Management and Interpersonal Skills and is a working professional actor.
He had a successful career in Investment Management for Allianz Dresdner as a Director in the Quantitative Investment Management Team and continues to work as a consultant in the Financial Services Sector.
Paul lives in Surrey and has a young family which keeps him busy. He does find time to sing Bass harmony for The Few, a ten voice acappella group which performs regularly all over London. |
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Geoff Bail
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Geoff Bail is our software programmer and IT expert and works with web based technology to enable and add value to many of the projects that we work on with our clients. Geoff's ability with and his focus on technology makes possible client projects such as business simulations, e learning packages and business efficiency improvements via database and website management to name just a few.
Geoff is also an ex secondary school teacher and so is well able to apply his IT and software programming skills in a learning and development environment so as to ensure maximum effectiveness of technology when we use it with our clients.
Geoff is a unique addition to our team and provides our business with a genuine point of difference. He lives in the Nottingham area and is a keen hockey player and is also Chairman of West Bridgford Hockey Club, one of region's leading clubs. |
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Lisa O'Dwyer
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Lisa O'Dwyer is our Operations Manager. Lisa supports our business in a wide variety of functions, particularly with client facing projects and management of our traning centre.
Lisa has spent many years working as an account manager in the finance sector for Lloyds Bowmaker as was, and then more recently Welcome Finance.
Lisa brings a structured and well organised approach to her work which adds to our organisation's ability to deliver what our clients want in the manner and timeline that they require.
Lisa lives in the Nottingham area and is a keen traveller and swimmer. |
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Ed Davies
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Ed originally studied and worked as an economist before switching to law, qualifying as a solicitor with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in 1997. Following a period in practice as a commercial lawyer with Olswang he moved into legal education, working initially for the College of Law and later as a senior lecturer at BPP. In recent years he has operated successfully as a freelance professional trainer, designing and delivering professional development and skills courses for organisations such as the Practical Law Company, Institute of Financial Services, Kaplan and the College of Law. He also worked for a year as a policy analyst for the Financial Services Authority.
Ed has particular experience and interest in modern multi-media training, having written and presented numerous training films on a range of topics including corporate law, financial services, and practice management, and has designed and delivered a number of i-tutorials and e-learning packages. The content of his training and presenting is mainly split between black-letter law and finance, and people development skills. He is passionate about motivating his training audiences, and particularly enjoys a variety of different teaching methods, whether small seminars or large lectures, straight delivery or group facilitation, and a variety of different audience profiles, whether senior or junior, professional or support staff.
Ed lives in North London, where he juggles a wide range of interests from playing guitar to collecting antiquarian books and maps, but is probably most content when skiing or sailing.
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Liz Thomas
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Liz has worked in education for the last 30 years as a teacher, staff development officer, Assistant Principal and University Lecturer in Education. She has therefore significant experience of working in primary through to H.E.
She is currently a Teacher Training Co-ordinator at South Nottingham College and Chair of Governors at a large Nottinghamshire secondary school and this gives her a strategic insight into issues relating to comprehensive school management.
As Staff Development Officer at West Notts College, Mansfield she initiated the first residential training sessions for staff to work across departments on common issues to do with middle management development in FE.
A spell abroad, working first in Kenya for 4 years as a teacher of History and English in a secondary school , and again in India at the Bihar School of mines Bihar State, teaching Scientific English to University staff has given her an international perspective on education for the global workplace.
Liz is also an external verifier for City & Guilds for the new Certificates and Diplomas in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector. Her extensive working knowledge of these new qualifications, set in place by the workforce reforms of 2007, gives her state of the art understanding of the needs and expectations of the new professionals in the post-compulsory sector.
Liz lives in Nottingham and is keen on designing textiles, writing, walking and yoga. She loves travel, gardening and working on her allotment. |
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Susan Brown
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Susan is a qualified management development specialist and has been involved with learning and development since 1989. She is experienced in providing 360 feedback and has a proven track record in creating generic and bespoke solution based interventions, which result in transformational change and improved leadership, team working and performance.
Before becoming a Management Development Trainer Susan held a range of management positions in a variety of organisations including the John Lewis Partnership, Nottinghamshire County Council, Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS.
Susan specialises in culture change and Employee Engagement - a key to innovation, competitiveness and business success. She has extensive experience in developing and supporting the successful implementation of policy and processes such as appraisal and recruitment. Her enthusiasm, passion and approachable style have developed her reputation in creating successful personal development programmes such as confidence building and presentation skills.
Keen on cooking and entertaining, Susan is also an avid follower of Notts County Football Club, particularly as her son currently plays for the under 13’s!
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