Akila Raju is a creative learning and development professional with over 18 years of work experience across various industries and diverse workplace environments. She has been instrumental in setting up learning teams in various organisations and brings in facilitation, consulting and project management experience to set up high performing teams. She brings a rich contextual knowledge, of people and process to build proactive solutions and recommendations to help develop business and people development strategies.

In her role as Director, Ask Learning and Consulting, she combines her rich and varied experience across various industries to help develop learning strategies, design and deliver programmes and facilitate organisational development interventions.

She started her career with the Taj group of hotels as an operational management trainee, she has taught at the Institute of Hotel Management and was responsible for grooming students to work in the hotel industry. She moved back to hotels and worked with the “The Park” hotels in Bangalore and Chennai, she moved to the BPO industry with First Source Solutions and managed the entry level training teams to help clients across various verticals transitioning their processes to India, she joined Goldman Sachs and spent 8 years in the learning function helping manage it and deploy various learning strategies across functions and levels.

Having trained about 10000 people her core expertise lies in the areas of leadership development, organisational development, coaching and project management. Akila is a facilitator and coach with experience across a broad range of verticals and industries, she designs, develops and facilitates programmes (product, process, management, leadership development topics), experiential training interventions and hospitality management training.

Sunil Nalinaksha Kumar is an Electrical Engineer, he started his career as a business development manager for Systems Aids, A company manufacturing Data Acquisitions systems and Add on Cards, he has travelled extensively across the country and has interacted with various defense establishments, technology institutions, manufacturing Industries and research and development laboratories

He brings to the board his expertise across varied industries. Sunil’s foray into entrepreneurship was in the engineering industry where he partnered to set up a powder painting and auto parts manufacturing unit in 1996 to cater to automobile giants such as M/s Maruti Udyog, Hyundai, General Motors, Ford, Toyota and Honda Motors etc.

About 12 years ago he diversified his portfolio and forayed into the hospitality industry. He has investments in Business Hotels and Restaurants in Bangalore and Chennai.

Sunil is an avid golfer who believes that an immersive form of skill and talent development when offered in an experiential way produces impactful results. He has brought to the fore his passion for golf and entrepreneurship with an experiential training company.

The concept of merging leadership with the tenets of golf on the course is a unique offering combining both his passion and his leadership capabilities. This programme designed leveraging Leadership and Golf is being successfully implemented across various industries. Sunil is a member of the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry), FHRAI (Federation of Hotels and Restaurants Association of India) and TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Network.

Jagadish Subramanian has an extensive work experience of 24 years in the Sales and Services industries both in India and The US.

Core Strengths

• Strategy
• Account Management
• Consultative and ROI Selling
• Leadership and Business Acumen
• Presentation Skills
• Negotiation Skills
• Customer Service for Corporates and MNCs across India and South East Asian Countries

In her role as Director, Ask Learning and Consulting, she combines her rich and varied experience across various industries to help develop learning strategies, design and deliver programmes and facilitate organisational development interventions.

She started her career with the Taj group of hotels as an operational management trainee, she has taught at the Institute of Hotel Management and was responsible for grooming students to work in the hotel industry. She moved back to hotels and worked with the “The Park” hotels in Bangalore and Chennai, she moved to the BPO industry with First Source Solutions and managed the entry level training teams to help clients across various verticals transitioning their processes to India, she joined Goldman Sachs and spent 8 years in the learning function helping manage it and deploy various learning strategies across functions and levels.

Having trained about 10000 people her core expertise lies in the areas of leadership development, organisational development, coaching and project management. Akila is a facilitator and coach with experience across a broad range of verticals and industries, she designs, develops and facilitates programmes (product, process, management, leadership development topics), experiential training interventions and hospitality management training.

Ashish Bhuwania has a work experience of 11 years in the manufacturing industry and the learning and development sphere.

Core Strengths

• Strategy
• Presentation Skills
• Communication Skills
• Time Management
• Theatre based workshops

Core Strengths

Ashish began his career as Business Associate for a manufacturing and export unit. After working for 2 years, he found his real passion of training and hence started his career as a learning and development consultant at Accord Consultants Pvt. Ltd. Post his stint with Accord, Ashish joined Siksha Training and Development Pvt. Ltd., where he worked for 2 years as a core member of the learning and development team.

He built his expertise in content development and experimenting with different methodologies at Siksha, which helped him achieve better results for workshops. Currently, he is the Managing Partner of Skill Labs. Over the last 8 years, Ashish has also been a theatre actor by being part of close 200 plays and 10 short films.

Qualification

• MBA, XLRI Jamshedpur
• Master Practitioner, NLP
• NLP Coach

Clients Closely Worked With

3DPLM, Accenture, Airbus, Analog Device, ANZ, Ashok Leyland, Berlitz, BITS Pilani, Broadcom, Cisco, Daimler, EMC2, Enzen Global, Ernst & Young, Fidelity, Genpact, GKN Aerospace, Goodrich, HR College of Commerce, Headstrong, Honeywell, IFIM, Infosys, Madura Garments, Mindtree, Neovia, Novozymes, Olam, Oracle, SAP Labs, Sonata Software, Symantec, TVS Motors, Volkawagen, Volvo, Wipro, Wellcome Trust and others.

Priti is a versatile professional with interests ranging from sales, consulting, business development, learning and development and building organizational capability. She founded the Catalyst in 2009 with the dream of offering unique skill enhancement opportunities to individuals across various kinds of institutions and organizations at various levels. Her interest in people development started very early in her career, even before the entrepreneurial bug bit her, when as a sales manager and a leader at HUL, she pioneered and rolled out various learning forums for her team. She continued to mentor and coach peers and subordinates in her role as a strategy consultant at Accenture. The journey of self actualization for self and others continues unabated as she passionately believes that learning is the only path to progress both personally and professionally. She spends considerable amount of time enhancing her own skills as a facilitator and assessor through various certifications, webinars and coming up with new strategies and approaches to develop effective and engaging learning techniques . She has conducted a number of consulting projects, assessment centers and training programs on sales effectiveness, leadership, communication, team building, time management etc. with various clients and locations.

Priti is an MBA from XLRI and an economics graduate from St Stephen’s college, Delhi University. Apart from pursuing her dream (The Catalyst), Priti loves to spend time with her kids and read books across various subjects.

Cheryl Samtaney has a total of 20 years of work experience of which 12 years have been in training. She strongly believes that her role as a facilitator helps individuals to unleash their untapped potential, which in turn enhances their efficiency and productivity.

Facilitator and Coach on the panel of international training organizations such as American Management Association (AMA), Mind Gym and Development Dimensions International (DDI), Local Training Director for Dale Carnegie Training, India.

Having trained around 20, 000 people so far, her core expertise lies in the areas of Leadership development, Communication & Presentation Skills, Business Etiquette, Team Dynamics and Train the Trainer programs. Some of the industries Cheryl has worked with include Finance,

Consulting, Pharmaceuticals, Infrastructure, Logistics, Energy, Manufacturing, IT, FMCG, Hospitality and Telecom. Being passionate about training, Cheryl constantly looks at ways to innovate and bring an element of fun, relevance and creativity into her workshops.

Cheryl is based out of Mumbai, and was instrumental in setting up her training firm Coaching Spectrum