Neill Loughlan

I remember very distinctly my mum dropping into the office where I was working in my first job as an 18 year old office junior. She asked my then manager how I was getting on. He said that I was doing well and had shown that I had the potential to become an office manager in the future.

At the time, this was an excruciatingly embarrassing episode. In addition I felt duty bound to prove that my manager was correct plus not disappoint my proud mother. So I set about studying and discovering as much as I could about management and leadership. Sure enough, by the time I was 21 I held my first management position with two direct reports. Not exactly as challenging as the position of CEO at Shell Oil, however this role was to trigger my interest in helping others to maximise their performance.

Over the following years I held a range of operational leadership roles with increasing spans of control and responsibility and truly believed that I had found my niche. This was something I was good at.

By now I was working for a large UK bank and my mentor advised me that if I wanted to take my career to the next level, then I really should experience other areas of the business and not remain operationally focussed. As a result, almost by accident I found myself within the Learning and Development function.

I was smitten. Within three months I realised that the elements of people management roles that I loved were about developing skill and enhancing performance. Suddenly I had a role that allowed me to do this full time.

My passion for learning and people's ability to learn had been ignited. I spent the next ten years working within the learning teams of large organisations. I had the privilege of working with some great people who had a real passion for people development and strong values and beliefs about what good learning looks like. During this period I built my philosophy about how to best help learners to learn.

I then ran into Andy and it became clear that we had the same passion for helping others to learn and the same beliefs about how to do it.

Two years later we formed Illuminate Development, a learning and development consultancy based upon the single premise that the learner always has the answer, our job is simply to help them to find it - and boy does it feel good when they do.