The English nobody teaches you.

English was not my first language. I studied it diligently at school, only to arrive in London for university and discover that the English of lecture theatres, offices and boardrooms bore little resemblance to the English of my textbooks. The vocabulary, the tone and the unwritten conventions all had to be relearnt, quickly and largely on my own.

That experience shaped my career. I earned a BEng in Aerospace Engineering from Kingston University, UK and an MBA from Teesside University, UK, and went on to spend 17 years in senior roles. I have worked for and served organisations including Tesco PLC, JLL, HSBC, the London Stock Exchange Group, GSK, Nokia, DAMAC Properties, Panasonic Avionics, SGS and National Bonds Corporation, as well as several UAE government departments. Most recently I managed a group of companies owned by Ajman Free Zone, with 1,200 staff and responsibility for finance, HR, administration, procurement, engineering, facilities, operations, security, marketing, business development and transport.

My career spans Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and the sectors of government, banking and financial services, multinationals, industrial and commercial operations, real estate, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, aviation, electronics, laboratories, manufacturing, civil construction and MEP engineering. Across every one of them I have seen the same pattern: capable people held back not by what they know, but by how they communicate it. That is the gap I now coach.