Jonathan McIlroy – Education and Training Manager

Jonathan has direct responsibility within EAN and the EA Academy for for all aspects of education and training development and delivery, including all public and in-house programs and all conferences. He is also responsible for overseeing all finance, IT and accounting matters within the business.

He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 1993 with a Master of Arts degree in Politics. Post graduation, his first career move saw him take an internship in Washington DC, indulging his passion for politics and learning the fundamentals of campaign management and interest-group fundraising.

After returning to the UK, he took a role with one of the world's largest financial institutions in a sales capacity. Two years later he took his finance and political experience and embarked on an eight year career within management positions in several global companies responsible for producing research driven, high quality conferences and training programmes for the finance, banking, investment and funds management communities.

From 2001 to 2005 he was General Manager of an Australian business that designed and produced over 20 large finance and investment related seminars and exhibitions in Australia and overseas each year. During that period he grew the pre-tax profit of the business by over 800% and also successfully managed the business through a transition of ownership after a corporate buyout, all the time continuing to grow profit and turnover year on year.

In 2005, after achieving the goals he committed to achieving during a two year structured buy-out, and seeking a change from the finance sector, he established the Executive Assistant Network with co-director Natasha Cannon.

David Thomson – Education and Training Manager

David has a unique mix of training, facilitation, instructional design and coaching skills at all levels combined with over 18 years of strategic business and sales experience.

Throughout his career he has worked across a wide range of industry sectors with large corporates, small to medium businesses and within the public sector – Federal, State & Local. With extensive knowledge of organisational & behavioural psychology, David draws from being a certified hypnotherapist and counsellor, therefore truly rounding off the mix of pyschological, behavioural and indepth strategic business acumen. He is not only able to provide participants with highly effective tools and methodologies on what to do, but also able to raise their awareness on why they do what they do. This provides the additional benefits of greater insight and heightens the participant’s emotional intelligence in the process.

He brings this extensive experience to benefit participants and transforms the training room into a highly interactive and enjoyable learning environment. His dynamic delivery and excellent engagement of participants ensures that they see real changes when they return to their workplace. He has many examples and stories to share with participants that are relevant to their own challenges and helps expand their thinking and cement the learnings. This coupled with his pragmatic approach ensures that participants have the best skills and techniques available to create real workplace change and come out with practical tools they can use throughout life. Equally

David has solid practical experience in one on one coaching environments, from new employees right through to top C level management across industry verticals. Here he draws on a combination of tools and methodologies to enable the participants to develop pragmatic skills and knowledge, whilst creating achievable outcomes and goals. David aims to take the “fluff” out of training and provide easily adaptable knowledge that has been empirically proven to be effective in the real world.