Meet our Workshop Speakers
Rachel Kerrigan | Future Skills
No Time to Wait: Building Agile Generalist Competencies in a Rapidly Changing Technological Landscape
Rachel Kerrigan is a Senior Project Manager in the Digital team at the Future Skills Organisation, where she leads complex, nationally significant initiatives focused on innovation, digital capability, and the development of generalist skills across the Australian economy.
Her work focuses on how people think, adapt, and connect at work as technology, roles, and career pathways continue to change. Rachel leads and contributes to initiatives that build scalable, transferable capability across digital literacy, artificial intelligence, cyber awareness, and core human employability skills. These capabilities are designed to be developed deliberately and applied in practice, rather than treated as add-ons to technical training.
Working across workforce planning, training product development, and system implementation, Rachel collaborates with industry, government, Jobs and Skills Councils, and education providers to strengthen how generalist skills are defined, developed, and embedded across the VET system. She brings a strong focus on learning coherence, portability, and real-world application to support workforce mobility, productivity, and inclusion.
With a background in leadership, engineering, and complex program delivery, Rachel brings a grounded, systems-level perspective to generalist skills reform, focused on practical learning pathways that equip people to thrive in rapidly evolving work environments.
Beth Hall | Culture Edge
The Capability Playbook for an AI-Enabled Workforce, How L&D can redesign systems, not just skills
Beth is an organisational development leader and facilitator with 25 years’ experience helping organisations lift performance through culture, capability and practical people solutions. She holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology alongside postgraduate qualifications in psychology and learning management, grounding her facilitation in both scientific evidence and practical application.
Beth has led large-scale OD and leadership programs as Global Head of Organisational Development at Cotton On Group and set national HR standards and Certification as General Manager, Standards & Capability at AHRI. She is a Fellow of both the Australian Institute of Training and Development and the Australian HR Institute and is accredited in a wide range of leading frameworks and tools including Saville Wave, LSI, GSI, Denison, EQ-i 2.0®, GLWS, TKI, HBDI and NLP.
Evidence-informed and action-oriented, Beth designs learning that is immediately usable on the job. Her deep experience leading large, geographically dispersed teams informs her practical, results-driven facilitation that builds confident leaders, resilient cultures and measurable performance shifts.
Michelle Ockers | Learning Uncut
AITD Capability Framework in Action
Michelle Ockers is a learning strategist and capability development specialist who has been an active AITD member for over a decade. In 2019, she was awarded the Dr Alastair Rylatt Award for L&D Professional of the Year in recognition of her contribution to the profession. Michelle played an instrumental role in developing the AITD Capability Framework, guiding the work of the L&D community to develop the framework and working closely with AITD on implementation.
Anneli Blundell | Anneliblundell.com
The power of presence: Amplifying authority in moments that matter
A dynamic speaker and communication expert, Anneli is known for her sharp insights, contagious curiosity, and ability to decode the invisible dynamics that shape how people show up, speak up and connect at work.
As an expert in Communication Dynamics, Anneli helps people get heard. Whether it’s buy-in from the boss, collaborating with colleagues, or discussing tricky topics, this is about building conversational cultures where people feel seen, heard and valued.
Anneli is on a mission to humanise the leadership landscape and change the conversation culture at work. And as AITD’s 2021, L&D Professional of the Year, and the Gold Stevie award winner for Female Entrepreneur of the Year, 2021, she creates conversational cultures, through a carefully crafted blend of keynote speaking, executive coaching, and behaviour change programs that stick.
Anneli is also a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), and has served on the National Board of Professional Speakers Australia and as the Victorian Chapter President. She’s also the author of several books on shifting human behaviour and loves any meal cooked by someone else.