Kerwin Hack

Kerwin is a career coach and motivational speaker from Cambridge, UK. He has enjoyed a long career in financial services, tackling many roles before becoming a technical trainer, working with individuals and groups across the country. As many companies do, he became so good that they stopped him training to make him the manager! This started his career up the management ladder, looking after trainers, help desks, technical teams and project teams. He had a period supporting one of the directors as part of his development and joined the executive team of the business services area. Apart from business development, he also had responsibility for organising and running the annual conferences for up to 400 people. One of the benefits of this role was that Kerwin was able to host or participate in the events, calling upon his experience of being in front of an audience. It was during this time that he volunteered to help support the graduate recruitment programme, working with new recruits to the organisation and supporting their development. Although this was a mentoring programme (slightly ironic as Kerwin joined the organisation straight from school!), this was his first taste of helping people with their careers outside of his line management responsibilities.

Kerwin subsequently moved into the IT organisation within the company as a Customer Services Manager, acting as the liaison betwee IT and the business. As this was during the y2k period, relationships between the two were at an all time low! During this time he picked up responsibility for the IT Communications Group, and continued to present at conferences. He then successfully applied to head up the Service Management area, bringing three different helpdesks with different systems and processes together into one group. This brought him back into an Executive role and brought him to the attention of the Senior Executive, who moved him into the high potential talent scheme, designed to further develop new executives. As part of this Kerwin received additional development and support, including his own executive coach. It was at this time that he was trained as a coach in a pilot scheme to introduce coaching to the talent group, as well as joining the faculty of the internal "university" programme.

He was then offered his first director position, managing an operation of over 300 people, with the unenviable task of shutting one of the London offices and relocating staff to Reading. This involved all the union negotiations, as well running a redundancy programme and the offshoring of one of the functions to India.

Once this was implemented, Kerwin was moved into a new directorship, to manage new area and oversee a multi million pound cost reduction and downsizing programme. By this time Kerwin was well established as one of the Senior Coaches in the organisation, working with people at all levels in the company as well as developing and running an internal talent management group and management development programme. This reignited his passion for training, and tied in with his newer enthusiasm for coaching.

Internal opportunities were limited at his level and having delivered this major change programme, he felt his future would continue outside of this organisation. This was agreed with the senior executives and following an organisational design and senior management selection process, Kerwin left the organisation in the middle of 2007 to start his own coaching and training company, UnlockingTheCage.com.

Kerwin is a certified coach (CPCC), hypnotherapist (Dip. Hyp.) and a Master NLP practitioner.