CEO MONTHLY / Chairperson Awards 2022 4 International People Services Chairman of the Year 2022: Con Kittos Every day, governments all over the world are being challenged to develop progressive, innovative new ways of ensuring their workforces are employable, skilled, and competitive in an era of rapid and unprecedented social and economic flux. Through its international footprint, the team at Asuria supports tens of thousands of people every year into jobs, to develop new skills, and to help start or improve their new businesses. In CEO Monthly’s Chairperson of the Year Awards, Con and the Asuria team have demonstrated incredible success. Here we take a deeper look to find out how. The team at Asuria is committed to helping governments to deliver world-leading outsourced Human Services. In 2022, Government demand for a new model of innovative outsourced Human Services saw Asuria become one of the world’s most expansive and trusted providers. The team has helped more people than ever around the world to reach their job and career goals, including parents, young people, mature-aged job seekers, Indigenous job seekers, and those with a mental or physical disability. Delivering Government awarded contracts, Asuria unites the public and private sectors with the ultimate goal of getting people into jobs they can thrive in. Asuria now has more than 200 offices around the world. Based in Australia, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, the team provides frontline public services that make a real difference to people’s lives. They do this by fostering a strengths-based approach to job seeker personal empowerment, uncovering the values that individuals can bring to businesses. For those who are both new to job seeking, and the long-term unemployed, this pioneering approach often provides the foot in the door that has been desperately needed. The team’s ability to do this is based on its application of the latest thinking in cognitive and behavioural science. By focusing on individuals’ strengths rather than their experience alone, Asuria is able to find much stronger matches for their abilities in the marketplace. The team licenses, and has developed, best-in-breed technology in order to deliver the maximum possible impact at all times. What is truly remarkable, however, is the speed at which this was achieved. Con only took control of Asuria in 2016, and in the last six years has transformed the business from a loss-making human resources company to a global, top-tier provider of employment services. “My achievements with Human Services organisation, AngusKnight, which I joined in 1999, laid the groundwork for the journey I would later embark on with Asuria,” Con tells us. Just a year after joining the company, he would go on to become CEO of the firm. During his tenure there, he oversaw the transformation of the small, registered training organisation, generating less than $10 million USD in annual revenue, to become one of the largest providers in its space, with close to $100 million USD in annual revenue. The business that would become Asuria first came to Con’s attention in 2012 when he joined as Non-Executive Director for the UK-based multinational A4E Limited, and later was appointed Chairman of the Board following A4E’s acquisition by Staffline Group Limited, and subsequent rebranding to PeoplePlus. “Then in 2016, with the financial support of Gold Tiger Management, I acquired PeoplePlus Australia and set out on the path to turn the business into Asuria, transforming the company culture and focusing on a vision to be a progressive provider of employment services to governments all over the world.” The growth of Asuria is in no small part due to Con’s vision and tenacity as a leader. “Asuria is in the business of serving governments,” Con explains. “In order to be among the best at doing that, our job is to understand the immediate and justover-the-horizon challenges of governments, and to build solutions that respond to what they need to transform their countries, communities, citizens and their businesses. “We deal in macro issues like immigration, education, unemployment,” Con continues. “These are trends that shift the ground that governments stand on, and even influence how Sep22329 T
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