Susy P.

I am a highly motivated, committed, Human Resource and Business Development professional with 24 years' experience in developing solutions in industry, education, and financial services, working both in the UK and abroad, as an internal and external facilitator/consultant, in partnership with clients to identify their real needs and develop solutions that ensure ownership and effective implementation to meet the organisation's business objectives.

My earliest ambition in life was to be able to help people to help themselves, through understanding what they were doing and why, and how best to effect any changes necessary. This support philosophy and desire has guided the development of my career, starting with my choice of degree (Psychology), which enabled me to gain the necessary theoretical perspective on individual differences and why they occur.

I followed this by lecturing in Psychology in Further Education, which rapidly found its practical application in subsequent lecturing on Post-graduate Teacher Training Courses at Reading University. Lecturing as a process soon developed into 'educating' on a wide range of topics, where either the topics, or the process of educating itself, involved applied Psychology.

The need for people to have a simple, practical diagnostic and developmental framework through which to identify their strengths and weaknesses and assist with their future development led to my subsequent involvement in designing and delivering the earliest industry-driven NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) programmes in Further Education. These were to become the foundation of the UK's competence-based assessment, development, and training initiatives.

A desire to test out the value of these initiatives, in the industry most cynical about the value of education-derived initiatives to profitability, resulted in my appointment as Training Manager of Swiss Bank Corporation in the City of London. The skills involved in 'educating' were extended and developed to become best-practice, competency-based training needs assessment, training design, and delivery techniques.

At the same time, the City's requirement for the financial services industry to be regulated within a process of self-regulation led to the rapid growth of regulatory required training in the late eighties/early nineties. This provided the necessary impetus for all Financial Service Organisations to develop their own competence frameworks. This was initially just for regulated employees, as a means of recording, assessing, and developing those individuals' regulation-required competence standards, but it proved its value and was and is still being extended throughout the organisation and to provide an integrated and cohesive set of competence-based HR practices and procedures.

The shortage of individuals experienced in developing and implementing these tailored frameworks and the systems and procedures they support started my consultancy career, which developed to cover the areas listed below.

Whatever the initiative, my aim is for people and organisations to become self-developing and ultimately, self-managing, and this can best be done through helping them to increase their self-awareness as to where they are on the 'unconscious incompetence' to 'unconscious competence' learning curve and why and what they need to do to move themselves, and their business, onwards and upwards. Competence-based systems and procedures are an excellent tool for this, with competence development facilitation initiatives as the means of ensuring the onwards and upwards, virtuous spiral.