Kerri Summers – Co-Founder and Head of Client Services
Specialising in Organisational Design and Client Services
Kerri has consulted in working parent issues, diversity and retention of talent in a broad range of the FTSE 100 companies since 1997. She has helped thousands of working parents to thrive at work and at home by supporting the parent and the organisation alike via a range of innovative and industry leading initiatives.
Kerri entered the world of the working mother in 1997 when she had her first child. She found it surprisingly difficult, often feeling she lacked the know-how to be the mother she wanted to be and also conflicted about her career going forward. She sought objective help and advice on parenting and balancing her career and found it to be lacking and subjective not to mention laced with judgement about working mothers.
With a London Business School MBA behind her and many years experience in the corporate world at a senior level Kerri founded the Parent Company that same year. Her mission was simple: to provide intelligent, non judgemental support and advice for working parents.
Kerri is passionate about delivering excellence in this sector. She is a pioneer in support for working parents, committed to making services accessible and available at every level in an organisation. She has successfully driven the growth of the Parent Company by addressing the needs of working parents, responding to the changes within that and understanding commercial concerns and pressures in this area.
For the Working Parent Company she is committed to finding, developing and retaining the best professionals who work with parents. Presenters, coaches, trainers and subject experts are all personally chosen by her after a rigorous selection procedure. Performance is reviewed and supervised.
Kerri lives in London with her husband and two sons.
Sharon Charlton Thomson – Co-Founder and Head of Coaching Services
Sharon started working with us as one of our expert speakers in 2003. She has a special interest in balance for working parents, understanding your child’s needs as you return to work and the psychology of guilt. She is an experienced Coaching Psychologist with almost 15 years of direct 121 and group client work under her belt.
In 2005 motivated by the lack of resources available for working fathers, she spearheaded our paternity coaching offer and to this day runs many fathers coaching groups for our clients.
As an experienced coach Sharon was keen to develop our coaching services. Over the past 3 years she has built a coaching team that is unrivalled in the sector, one that shares a common purpose and values and most importantly one that was specifically trained to work with working parents.
With Kerri she has developed our Thought Leadership Group, a panel of sector experts who advise the coaching team of developments and trends that affect working parents today. Trained in family and systemic psychotherapy as well as executive coaching, Sharon runs our peer supervision groups and also works as a coach on many of our clients. She is responsible for both the recruitment and development of our coaching team. She is committed to CPD in this sector, to the improvement of gender diversity, to sustaining a world class coaching team and to making coaching services accessible to a wider group and communities.
Permeela Abboud – Corporate Account Manager
Permeela started with The Working Parent Company in 2007 after a career break to bring up her three children and to live in Germany for a few years. She has a degree in Psychology from The London School of Economics and has a background in Consulting and Recruitment.
Permeela is responsible for selling and marketing parenting seminars on core topics, based on universal parenting themes: directly responsible for developing new business, management of arranged events; assisting with internal client marketing, and ensuring the smooth running of events. She works with a wide variety of companies including investment banks, law firms, accountancy firms, consultancy businesses and other FTSE 100 companies.
As a Management Consultant Permeela implemented new accounting systems for large oil companies, trained staff in the use of these new systems and designed communication programmes. She also designed, developed and implemented management training programmes. Permeela also worked for a large Recruitment Consultants with the main emphasis on developing business. Her management role also included recruiting, training, motivating and developing staff.
Although with many useful skills, Permeela found the transition back to work challenging, having taken a break for a number of years. Her biggest challenges were the changing face of technology and once again having to deal with clients face to face. She undertook some IT training and attended many of the seminars being offered by The Working Parent Company, to meet the speakers and the clients. A useful by product of this was that many of the parenting talks were also of great value to her, something that had not been offered when Permeela initially had her children and was still working.
Permeela lives in London with her husband and youngest child who is 17, and currently has two children studying at University.
