About us

In 2007, Galia Barhava-Monteith and Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes founded Professionelle, a unique social venture dedicated to researching, understanding and addressing the needs of all professional working women in New Zealand.  We started this venture through our realisation that professional working women face unique challenges in the workplace and often feel isolated and unable to discuss them freely with peers and colleagues.  We believe that by bringing together women from all professions and industry sectors we can tap into their collective wisdom and experience to generate smart and practical solutions that materially assist women's career progress.

Professionelle is New Zealand's first and only enterprise of its kind and is targeted at women in large public and private organisations and in professional service firms. At Professionelle's heart is this website www.professionelle.co.nz, offering a wealth of free resources that cover the real issues professional women face in their careers - and beyond.  In our first three years, Professionelle gathered over 2000 members, mostly women. Our members are typically in their thirties and forties, with two thirds in full time employment and 75% tertiary educated. Professionelle is open to all (women and men) who wish to become members, and membership on our website is free.  

Professionelle specialises in developing highly relevant, tailored offerings for professional working women. Offline, we offer research-based networking seminars both in-house to corporate and professional service clients and publicly. Seminar topics range from 'Mentoring as a key ingredient for women's career success' to 'Living our values at work and beyond'.  in 2010, Professionelle launched a South Island Chapter offering our networking seminars in Christchurch, and we further expanded our regional presence to Wellington by the emd of the year. More towns will be added. Online, we are steadily building our professional development and support products offer. We also plan to harness ever improving web-based technologies to bring professional women together to learn about and discuss key issues, regardless of location.

Underlying all our work is extensive research into the most up-to-date thinking about what works for professional women. Our research combines academic thinking with practical solutions garnered from our ongoing interactions with our membership base.  Professionelle has also conducted original research on this topic for leading organisations in this field, such as Global Women, as well as for local media.

Love your work - there has been so much that has been bang on with what is going on in my life.

In April 2008, Galia appeared on TV One News in a Special Report discussing women and workplace flexibility. Hannah Ockelford, a Professionelle member and TV One reporter also interviewed professional women at our first birthday party.

Galia Barhava-Monteith

Galia holds a Masters in Developmental Psychology with First Class Honours from Auckland University. Her local work history spans corporate and professional service sectors. She began her career with The Boston Consulting Group, where she and Sarah met while sharing an office together and working all hours of many nights.

Later, Galia was appointed as HR coordinator in the merger that created Fonterra.  Her last corporate role was Ethics & Community Relations Manager at Fonterra.  

Nowadays, as well as being a Director of Professionelle, Galia works independently as an executive coach.  She is a Ministerial Appointee to the National Advisory Council for the Employment of Women. Between 2006 and 2011 Galia has acted as the independent coordinator of Fonterra's Candidate Assessment Panel,  working directly with the Chairmen of Fonterra and Fonterra's Shareholders Council. She recently featured in the Office of Ethnic Affairs' Trailblazers project.

Galia is married with two young, school age children.  She is very serious about taking exercise and is an avid Yoga practioner.  She has a soft spot for the great outdoors and tramping as she first arrived here as a backpacker, drawn by the luscious New Zealand bush.

Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

Sarah arrived in New Zealand twenty years ago, with an MBA from London Business School and a background in European marketing with Unilever.  She worked as a strategic business consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, becoming a senior Manager, before negotiating a shift to contracting after the birth of her first child.

More recently, in parallel with developing Professionelle, she has focused on her independent consulting portfolio, chiefly in her preferred industries of consumer goods and retail. She reckons that toilet paper and diamonds can be equally fascinating markets if you enjoy knotty problems and pattern recognition...

Through her children, Sarah garnered seven years' experience in education governance with a Montessori Primary Trust. She relaxes by rowing and writing romantic fiction.

 

Lynda Fairweather, Administrator

Lynda joined Professionelle as the new site was going live, just in time to help upgrade our backend systems to cope with growth.

Lynda is an Auckland-based working mum with two boys and she has years of valuable experience in adminstration, website and database management and accounts. She is also an avid golfer - and says she has a standing order for fine Thursday mornings!

 

 

Kathryn Jackson, Professionelle's Lead Facilitator, Christchurch

Kathryn has a 1st class honours degree in Human Resources and Sociology from Stirling and Texas A&M Universities, with a postgraduate diploma in workplace motivation. Her early career was in the UK in HR related roles in Andersen's and the UK banking industry before qualifying as a coach with the Oxford School of Coaching in 2006. She moved to New Zealand that year.

Kathryn first experienced Professionelle while researching her first book, 'How to Keep Your Cool If You Lose Your Job', for which she interviewed Galia.  Kathryn's business is careerbalance which specialises in providing tools and resources to support professionals and leaders in their personal growth. She has been instrumental in designing and delivering Manager as Coach training for the New Zealand Institute of Management and is a volunteer coach for the KEA Coach Trust in Canterbury.

Kathryn is married with a team of 'furry children' including Kali the cat, Shiva the dog, and twohorses called Angus and Mouse. Having lived in a variety of countries throughout her life, she loves to travel as often as she can and regularly supports non‐profit organisations like Riding for the Disabled.

Jann Watt, Professionelle's lead facilitator, Wellington

Jann is New Zealand's first Reach-Certified Personal Branding Strategist and is passionate about helping motivated mid-career professionals find their career mojo. Personal branding is a key to helping people focus on the positives in their lives, and Jann's mission is to be catalyst for making work meaningful and fun.

After observing highly talented people feeling unfulfilled in their roles, Jann stepped out of her corporate role in Organisational Development and launched de novo to enable her to follow her purpose of inspiring others to be the best they can be. Jann loves one-on-one coaching and is also adept working with groups in the role of facilitator or trainer.

Jann has a reputation of being a forward thinker, yet always practical, quickly tapping into the barriers that hold people back and giving them the tools and confidence to achieve their career goals. She is a firm believer that networking is all about sharing. This is seen in the number of coffee chats Jann fits into her busy week with people in her network.