Our people

Vanessa Cornelius

Vanessa has over 17 years project management experience in professional services in both client serving, human resource and organizational development roles.

Vanessa’s career began with KPMG in a client serving role but quickly recognised that her strengths were on the people side. After gaining post graduate qualifications in HR, Vanessa joined Deloitte in Australia and quickly moved into the role of Victorian HR Manager for an office of 550 staff.

Vanessa transferred to the US firm of Deloitte where she spent the next 6 years of her career. Her hard work ethic and business acumen contributed towards her working in a variety of regional and national organizational development roles for an employee base of over 30,000.

In the role of National HR Development Manager at Deloitte, Vanessa managed the firm’s Great Place to Work Survey project resulting in the firm being recognized as a Fortune 100 Great Place to Work™ for two years running.

Vanessa also developed an expertise in formalised mentoring and became a member of the firm’s National Mentoring Taskforce. In this capacity she led the establishment of Deloitte’s first formalized mentoring program, which also became the topic of her Masters Thesis, was involved in establishing a national mentoring intranet site and consulted on mentoring to the business.

Her final role in the US was as Senior Manager for Deloitte’s Initiative for the Advancement and Retention of Women. Deloitte is well known for its efforts in this space, and was recognized in Harvard Business Review. While in this role Vanessa project managed a number of leadership development programs targeted specifically towards advancing and retaining high talent women.

Upon her return to Australia Vanessa continued her career in organizational development with PricewaterhouseCoopers working on their National Equilibrium (Work/Life Balance) Initiative.

More recently Vanessa has focused her career on coaching. She has coached internally for Deloitte as part of Deloitte’s Career Connections Coaching Network as well as in her role as an HR professional

Vanessa has an undergraduate degree in Accounting, Graduate Diploma in HR and IR and a Masters in Business Leadership. She is strategic in her approach; comfortable working at all levels in an organization and has an international network.

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