About

I moved to Shenzhen in 2013 looking for adventure and opportunity, although at the time I could not have articulated exactly what I expected to find. During my first few years in China, I built a small consulting business, worked with local entrepreneurs and learned Mandarin. More importantly, I learned that organisations cannot simply transfer an idea from one culture to another and expect it to work. Progress begins with understanding how people build trust, make decisions and interpret the world around them.

After several years in Shenzhen, I moved to Foshan to join Midea Group. Working inside Group HR at the headquarters of a Chinese Fortune Global 500 business gave me the opportunity to support international growth at a very different scale. I designed and managed global development initiatives, including the International Voyager programme, and helped create learning and talent infrastructure for leaders working across countries, cultures and business functions. I was the only foreigner in my immediate department, and the experience taught me as much about adaptation, influence and relationships as it did about leadership development.

When I returned to the UK, my career gradually moved from learning programmes towards the broader talent systems surrounding them. At Roundhouse and later the IFRS Foundation, my work expanded into competency frameworks, job and career architecture, succession, internal mobility, management capability and learning technology. I began to see more clearly that learning rarely fails because the content is poor. It fails because the organisation has not connected learning to roles, careers, performance, leadership expectations or the work people are actually being asked to do.

I now lead global talent management and learning work within the clinical research sector, supporting an international and highly regulated workforce. Alongside this, I am building a focused independent practice around global talent systems and AI-enabled workforce development. My interest is not in using AI to produce more content. It is in helping organisations understand how work is changing, which capabilities will matter, how managers need to lead differently and where technology can make talent decisions clearer without removing human judgement.