Sarah Helm is a learning & development specialist with a human resources background including extensive experience in employment law, recruitment, generalist HR and learning and development.

Sarah embraces projects with passion and thrives on developing creative and enjoyable ways to enable people to learn, develop and also to increase their personal effectiveness and productivity.
Sarah’s HR background allows her to be objective and have empathy and understanding of others needs and learning styles.

Above all Sarah is committed to achieving results and always open to new ideas and feedback.

Corrina Thewlis-Smith has 17 years experience as a learning & development consultant. She has seen lots of new ideas come and go; she passionately believes that the biggest differentiator in business is people. Because of this she thrives by bringing the best out in individuals and teams and she loves seeing people amaze and challenge themselves.

She began her career with The Body Shop where she worked for 10 years and she has always remained in touch with the exciting and fast moving 'coal face' of retail. Her experience of this demanding and reactive retail environment has influenced her style, which is very much about encouraging a ‘do something different tomorrow' approach to gain better results.

For the last 7 years she has worked as a freelance L&D consultant and as a result has experience in many sectors. You are as likely to find Corrina in a ball gown attending a function in the Officers mess with her husband as you are to find her in her sweaty training kit running 8 miles on a Sunday morning.

Corrina is extremely driven to doing the right job first time and ensuring that training meets the needs of the business.

Ruth Heaton is a qualified solicitor with over 5 years post qualification experience of working for a major international law firm as a banking and finance lawyer. Ruth’s main speciality lay in acquisition and leveraged finance, private finance initiative project finance and general corporate lending and refinancing. Her background of working in a fast moving and demanding business has equipped her with exceptional communication skills and the ability to understand a client’s business, identify key issues and use this knowledge to negotiate the best position for her client.

Ruth’s experience of coaching both members of her team and bankers has evoked a passion for becoming involved with learning and development where she can transfer her experience in applying excellent time management skills, being part of a driven and highly successful team and achieving excellent results in a demanding environment into encouraging others to succeed in the cut and thrust of the business world.

When not at work Ruth is most likely to be found pottering in the countryside with her family, nestled in an armchair with a good book or when given the chance, skiing in any ski resort where hot chocolate and vin chaud are plentiful.

Catherine Semark has over ten years’ experience as a coach, trainer and facilitator and owes her fresh and engaging style to a background in stand up comedy, theatre and improvisation. Her approach combines content, structure and credibility with humour, spontaneity and energy and she particularly enjoys working with ‘challenging’ participants.

She is a certified trainer of NLP combining this with improvisation techniques.

She is proud to be a founder member of The Undersigned, London’s ‘crack team of improvisers’ (TimeOut).

If she were a Top Trumps card, her special skill would be the ability to correctly gauge the mood of the group and flex her style accordingly.

Chris Packwood is Gecko's lead design consultant.

Chris worked in the IT industry for over 10 years, starting out as a telecommunications programmer before quickly moving into management where he looked after large teams of developers located around the globe.

7 years ago Chris pounced on an opportunity to apply his highly creative flair with his technological and managerial background to design and develop new and exciting training for Gecko.

Chris spends any spare time he has away from his laptop either sailing his boat in the Solent, exercising or typically, in the winter on his snowboard for as many days possible.