Andre de Wit is a motivational and experienced speaker, regarded for the combination of global successful operational leadership experience and strategic human resource experience in leading international companies.  

On the speaker’s platform, he is engaging and passionate. His blend of power and warmth, as well as knowledge and instinct, translates into messages that are informative, entertaining, and practical. Because of his wide experience as a facilitator and speaker, he is able to build interactivity with the audience quickly.

Currently, Andre is the dean of Leadership Academy Amsterdam, an organisation specialised in creating leadership interventions for organisations in turbulent environments. As a CEO within IKEA and the Metro Group, Andre gained more than 20 years’ leadership experience with large corporate organisations. During his time as vice president of learning in the Metro Group and Carlsberg Group, he was involved in the design and implementation of leadership interventions from the perspective of learning.   

The topics Andre speaks about in conferences are the relationship between the changing world (10-20 years’ perspective) and the demands this will have on future leadership. He will share within his area of expertise the ways these future demands on leadership can be included in a leadership development strategy. The latest practical example is the “Learning Leaders Program” that he developed and implemented for the Carlsberg Group.

For the past 16 years, Dave has been responsible for establishing, leading, and providing thought leadership in the HR space; all revolving around a range of solutions that have complemented and supported the wide range of assessment, development, and online talent management based approaches that IBM has developed. Dave has worked directly with a variety of different organisations across the globe offering a range of senior assessment and development programs, executive coaching and organisationally based performance, employee engagement, and capability-based solutions across the financial services, hospitality, healthcare, retail, engineering, logistics, utilities, and public sector.

All his project work has revolved around global and multi-national based organisations where transformational and strategic based interventions have supported executive stakeholders need for change and performance improvement. He is well known in the HR social media circles through the sharing and curating of key learning materials and articles through @HRCurator.

He has been referenced as being one of the ‘Most Influential People’ on Twitter in the subject areas of HR, people/HR analytics, Future of Work, and organisational development. He has also been recognised as the Number 1 Global Brand on Twitter relating to the Future of Work subject matter.

With 20 years in learning & development, Oliver leads organisation and talent development for EMEA sales & consulting at Oracle and has held a number of roles within customer training, employee and partner learning, and OD during his 18 years at Oracle/ Sun. He started his career at a CRM startup and at the same time continued to be a highperformance curler and became national coach for Germany later.

Chara is originally a biochemist and has spent much of his early career in academia, training medical doctors, and other healthcare professionals. He joined Bayer in 2011 as head of learning innovation and design within Bayer HealthCare’s Global Development organisation. Chara had a brief spell in 2015, within corporate HR, supporting the talent management organisation with the co-creation of a new Bayer learning and training strategy, with over 30 other local/global/functional academies. He officially moved to his current role as director for corporate innovation in August 2016 and has two focus areas: (i) leading on the innovation knowledge, skills, and leadership learning needs of the organisation by establishing an Innovation Academy at Bayer (ii) supporting the roll-out and maintenance of the innovation framework, particularly the innovation coaches community. Chara also currently leads Bayer in a European Commission Erasmus+ project with a number of academic and business partners investigating and proposing new innovative approaches to learning and training across the EU and beyond. He is a well-known figure in the learning and development industry having delivered keynote presentations at numerous conferences and also winning prestigious awards for learning innovation as part of the teams he’s worked in.

Joaquín Azcue is currently a leadership and innovation professor at Universitas Telefonica, delivering academic programmes in 20 countries and is also Telefonica’s chief e-learning officer in charge of Universitas MOOC factory. In the past, he has been a teacher in digital switching systems and then was in charge of the Alcatel University and Union Fenosa building projects. He has a degree in solid state physics and a Ph.D. in social sciences. He is part of the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas research group in innovative learning technologies.

As vice president of learning infrastructure and PMO, Ari Katanick is accountable to shape a powerful learning culture for SAP’s 100,000 employees and contractors globally. Under Ari’s vision and direction are the project management office for all learning projects, SAP’s internal implementation and maintenance of SAP’s SuccessFactors Learning solution (LMS), standards and governance for learning content and the LMS, training and support for our LMS administrators, and LMS administration services for the HR Board Area. Prior to his current role, Ari was vice president and learning officer for SAP’s Services University where he was responsible for driving the overall strategy and continuous go-to-customer field enablement for SAP’s 14,000-person services organisation.

Ari has spent the past 12 years at SAP, in a variety of leadership roles, within the learning function. Ari’s background includes over 25 years of experience, most of them in services consulting in the high-tech industry, and has led Services University equivalents at SAP, Business Objects, and PeopleSoft. Ari graduated with high honours from Michigan State University with a degree in computer engineering.

Currently, Eberhard is the head of HR management information and analytics Germany at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. In that position, he is responsible for provision of HR data insight in the Germany region and furthermore drives analytics research and methodological development in global initiatives. Before that, he worked with The Boston Consulting Group for five years, recently as a project leader in the Financial Institutions and the technology advantage practice groups. Eberhard holds two master’s degrees in physics and in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, which explains his passion for analytics. In 2016, he was rewarded as Top 40 under 40 Managers by the Capital magazine in Germany.

As global lead for SAP’s Career Development practice, Barbara is responsible for the foundations and processes that help all 87,000 employees develop their careers at SAP. Her vision and efforts span strategic and tactical activities: processes to guide development planning through content curation to ensure exemplary development opportunities are available. She also is responsible for SAP’s competency framework, driving the conversations that managers and employees have to be prepared for the “future of work”.

Barbara is also a Learning Culture Ambassador within the company, an advisor to SAP’s award-winning women’s leadership program LEAP (Leadership Excellence Acceleration Program) and is an award-winning employee who maintains thought leadership in the Learning and Talent Management HR disciplines. She is an example of the career success story she would like to see.

After having risen through the ranks, starting as an instructional designer for global marketing, she’s held leadership roles in SAP’s Services University and now HR. Prior to her tenure at SAP, she was a principal process consultant for Sungard SCT (now Ellucian), serving higher education ERP customers in North America, and director of instructional technology at her alma mater, Wilkes University.

Barbara holds both her Master of Science degree in education and Bachelor of Arts (Summa Cum Laude) degree in communications from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Shivadarshan Deshamudre is a learning leader with more than 20 years of experience in L&D and is responsible for building a high impact learning organisation, developing a learning culture, competency-based role development, and business impacting interventions. Shivadarshan is also adept in working across multicultural environments and across geographies with clear focus on learning efficiency and effectiveness.

Barbara Rajmanska is a HR practitioner with over 20 years of experience in various industries: finance, IT, FMCG, and currently pharma. She is a believer of continuous development and promoter of corporate cultures where cooperation and ‘human touch’ plays an important role. She is a member of the management team and business partner experienced in organisation transformation, where helping people to ‘swim in new waters’ is critical. She applies psychological knowledge and experience to help individuals and teams become more effective and engaged.

Alex is the CEO and co-founder of Fresh Check. He completed an undergraduate degree in chemical biology at Nottingham University and went on to undertake a Ph.D. in the same subject at Imperial College London. It was here that he met Fresh Check co-founders Robert Peach and John Simpson. In February of 2015, they first developed Fresh Check as a novel tool for detecting bad hygiene with a simple blue to orange colour change technology. Since developing the company, it has garnered international interest and has been featured on the Forbes 30-Under-30 List in 2017. Alex is now the full-time CEO of Fresh Check and oversees the development of the company with commercial partners interested in adopting the simple solution.

Juan Tinoco started his professional career in the customer service and logistics area in Procter & Gamble, moving later on to HR in the industrial division developing the HR function in two different production plants. After 7 years at P&G, he developed sales and organisation consultancy expertise as project manager in Development Systems in many different companies and sectors. Juan moved back to the HR function by joining Red Bull as HR director of Spain to set up the department in the country. He was later promoted to HR director Southern Europe, based in Red Bull HQ in Austria, leading the HR strategy of 11 countries. He also worked as global talent manager at the HQ before moving back to Spain where he is HR director for Spain and Portugal at LG Electronics. He is the first HR director to be certified as Senior Professional in Human Resources - International™ (SPHRi™) within the Top Employers companies in Spain and is collaborating with the company 2mProgress to expand this certification in Spain and Europe.

Claudiu Leverenz studied information systems at the Technical University of Munich in Germany with long term exchanges in the US and Australia. In 2015, during his studies, he started the project, GLASSCHAIR. The project deals with a new type of special steering for electrical wheelchairs which is now based on the use of smart glasses like Google Glass. People that are impaired by different diseases (ALS, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, etc.) or accidents (spinal cord injuries) might not be able to move or are limited in their legs and hands. Therefore, they are in need of a special steering solution. With GLASSCHAIR they can now steer their wheelchair just by using their head movements. At the beginning of 2017, Claudiu was nominated for ‘Forbes 30 under 30 Europe’ list in the category science & healthcare. GLASSCHAIR is planned to become not just a steering solution, but an everyday life assistant to help people.

In 2007, Meinrad Arnold started as the director of strategy, organisation, and people development of the AptarGroup. Currently he is the Director of Organization- and People Development. Meinrad was the founder of the Aptar Corporate University and is in charge of the development of the Corporate Leadership Programs. As defined in the value proposition of the Corporate University, it is important to offer a worldwide consistency in delivering key statements across all regions and segments. Today the Corporate University is present with its programs in 18 countries and 7 languages. All programs are developed ‘from Aptar for

Aptar.’ Meinrad has more than 30 years of professional experience and has worked for many years as an education trainer and strategy moderator. For more than 3 years he has been the president of a technical business school in Germany. Furthermore, he worked as a strategy and education consultant for 4 years at Malik St. Gall, Switzerland. After a mechanical engineering education, he lived in Italy and in the USA in the 90s. After 20 years in business, he moved to the field of education management and management education. He has a Management Certificate of St. Gall Business School (MPO, EMP) and AMP from INSEAD. Meinrad is the author of the book, ‘Animal Management Visions’, and conducts international management programs for his company. Together with his family, he lives in Constance, Germany.

Charlotte Slingsby has honours in electro-mechanical engineering (University of Cape Town). The South African now lives in London, having completed a double master’s in innovation design engineering (IDE) at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. She views design as a powerful tool for transformation. With this mission in mind, she has founded 2 London based startups; Moya Power LTD, researching and developing an alternative wind energy harvester to adapt to the urban environment, and Nettoken Limited, developing a platform to manage our digital identities.

Yuriy studied in Ukraine and, the USA and was a fellow of the highly competitive Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Program of the US Department of State. He started his professional career with Nestlé Group as an intern in 2001 and joined full time in 2002 as an international auditor at the HO in Switzerland. The very program of international audit was designed to be a true professionaladventure, taking Yuriy to over 30 countries and giving leadership responsibility early on. Yuriy took over the role of a country manager of Nestlé Moldova in 2006 and 3 years later moved to Africa with a mandate to establish Nestlé business in Zambia and Malawi. In 2013, Yuriy moved to Kenya, responsible for coffee business in Equatorial Africa and in 2015 he took over his current role as HR director for Nestlé in Ukraine and Moldova. Nestlé in Ukraine and Moldova employs around 5000 people, including over 1100 young professionals at the BPO center in Lviv. As part of the Nestlé Global Youth Initiative, where was Nestlé employed over 1300 employees under the age of 30 in 2015 and 2016. Nearly 500 students and recent graduates were exposed to the company as interns during the same period.