As Chief Executive Officer and Partner at Mercer Talent Enterprise, David Jones heads up business growth and expansion efforts across global markets and is instrumental in leading key client relationships across the organisation. He is also the driving force behind the company’s research and innovation efforts to identify future human capital priorities.

With over 34 years of human capital experience, of which 26 years are within the Middle East, he has worked with clients in over 40 countries on a broad range of talent, leadership, assessment, performance, transformation, innovation and inclusion projects. He is experienced in using a wide variety of psychometric instruments.

Jones holds an undergraduate degree from the University of York, Post-Graduate Degree from University of West England, Executive MBA from University of Bradford and PhD from University of Leicester. He also participated in a leadership programme in London Business School and is qualified with the British Psychological Society at both Level A and Level B.

With a background in labour market economics, Jones is a senior advisor to policymakers and organisational leaders on their most pressing human capital priorities. He regularly lectures at universities across the globe, including the University of Cambridge – UK, the European School of Management and Technology – Berlin, and the University of Bradford – UK.

Jones recently published his latest book, "The Future of Assessments" adding to his collection of books that include the best-selling ‘Unlocking the Paradox of Plenty’ and award-winning ‘Game Changers’. He has also contributed to books such as ‘Employment and Career Motivation in the Gulf States’ by Gerlach, ‘The Political Economy of Wasta’ by Springer and ‘Policy Making in the GCC’ by IB Tauris. Forthcoming publications include research contributions to volumes on the changing social contract in Saudi Arabia; an international perspective on happiness and positive psychology; and an edited volume on ‘The Future of Labour Market Reform in the GCC’ by Gerlach Press.

Jones is a self-confessed bike fanatic and thinks any car is "essentially a tin box with a wheel in each corner". He is proud to say that he has never owned a car, although he currently owns a total of seven bicycles and 13 motorbikes.

Lisa is a Partner in Mercer’s Career business, with a focus on Transformation. She is the Regional Transformation Centre of Excellence Lead for Middle East, India and Africa, and is based in the United Arab Emirates. She has worked in consulting for 17 years, and has worked for Mercer in the UK, Australia and across Europe. Lisa specialises in the areas of enterprise skills, strategic transformation programmes, talent management, HR strategy and change management. Lisa regularly contributes to thought leadership and has a Tedx talk on continuous reskilling.

Lisa led a skills strategy for an organisation that wanted to increase the speed of skill acquisition, increase the number of career opportunities for existing employees and develop the skills that they needed for the future. Lisa led the team to review external trends and existing skills data to determine the future skills list for the organisation. This was followed by skills strategy, metrics, and prioritisation of use cases for application e.g. for internal skills career pathways, and strategic workforce planning.

Lisa led a strategic workforce planning project for the future workforce plans of the technology and operations division in a 20,000-person global organisation. In conjunction with Oliver Wyman technology experts, Lisa reviewed the global location strategy, talent availability, and forecasted the five-year workforce plans. Lisa also developed the future skills for the technology function and completed a prioritisation exercise to understand the importance and impact of these skills.

Lisa led a strategic workforce planning project for a 300,000-person food retail organisation, to set up and establish a new strategic workforce planning centre of excellence with process, governance, technology and tools. This project was combined with an external labour market analysis for two business units to uncover labour availability insights across 6 global locations for the organisation.

Developed a new career philosophy, pathways, success profiles and transition steps for a global retail organisation of 27,000-person organisation that was struggling with high attrition rates, low employee engagement and over-reliance on external hiring.

Developed an organisation Design methodology and playbook for a 33,000-person organisation. This included setting up the philosophy, learning modules for the HR business partners, OD masterclasses and playbook. The strategy was around the empowerment of the businesses and shifting from a ‘one-time’ organisation design to a continuous evolution of the organisation design.

Lisa supported a global organisation to design and deliver agile organisation design methodology, tools and training to all its global HR Business Partners. The efforts upskilled and empowered local teams to manage more continuous organisational design changes.