Joined the Board: May 2020

Role: Programme & Events Director

Length of time with the network: 4 years

Fiona is an events and tourism specialist. As Senior Manager, Business Events at VisitBritain, Fiona delivers on the UK government’s strategy to grow international business events in the UK under the government-wide ‘GREAT Britain’ campaign.

Fiona leads an international marketing campaign a targeting the events industry which includes a busy event programme of international tradeshows and conferences and regularly speaking at events industry forums. 

At Reed Exhibitions – one of the world’s largest events companies and a FTSE-100 – Fiona delivered on an ambitious global growth strategy for the Travel Division with double-digit revenue growth. Through new launches and acquisitions, the Division doubled in size with 14 new events in 11 countries, including the international expansion of well-known events including World Travel Market, one of the UK’s largest trade events with 50,000 travel professionals. 

Fiona’s career started at the NZ Ministry of Tourism (now MBIE), giving tourism policy and research advice to the then Tourism Minister, Prime Minister John Key, working on a number of nationally-important tourism projects including the national cycleway.

Passionate about female empowerment and leadership, Fiona is excited to develop one of the most critical elements of the Network – its events and programmes – to enable the NZBWN community create powerful, personal connections.

Fiona grew up in Timaru, with a Bachelors and Masters degrees from Otago University. She’s lived in in London for nine years and loves travelling and the outdoors – especially snowboarding and mountain biking.

LinkedIn

We recently met two inspirational Kiwis Hannah Wrathall and Alice Marsh. They both come from opposite ends of NZ but they’ve been brought together by a desire to help millennials succeed in taking actions on issues they care about, through creating social enterprises, leading transformational cultural change and platforms to bring issues to the forefront. Hannah gave us some insight into what they are doing to help inspire people to make their dreams a reality.

What did you want to for a career when you were young?
For most of my childhood I wanted to be an actress (it’s never too late, right?). Alice wanted to be an optometrist (she has never had great eyesight!) 

If you’ve been lucky to meet or work Jude Sclater you’ll know how great she is at asking the right kind of questions to spark thought and conversation. She’s been a mentor in our mentoring groups for the past four years and many of us have been lucky enough to work with her.

Just over a year ago, after being made redundant, she decided to go it alone – a scary prospect but one she says is about going with what makes you happy and gives you time to think. It’s quite fitting that her coaching is called Think with Jude.

We recently caught up with her ahead of her next mentoring group Career Accelerator, which is starts in March. It’s open to any NZBWN members looking to push their career forward in the next six months.