User:Gavdragon/sandbox

Family life
Matthew Paul Somers (born 1967) is a management consultant specialising in providing coaching skills for managers. He grew up in London, attending Faraday High School and began his working life with Barclays Bank in their Notting Hill branch. His career with Barclays took him to Poole in Dorset but he now lives in North East England with his wife and daughter.

Barclays Bank Plc
Leaving school at 16, Matt joined Barclays on a standard-entry school leaver programme in 1983. He credits his fascination with the management of people to those early work experiences – not all of which were very positive.

After seven years or so of branch-banking Matt took up a role in personnel juggling a variety of recruitment and training responsibilities.

It was whilst working as a training manager that Matt attended a coaching skills programme run by Sir John Whitmore and Performance Consultants. Matt has said that attending this training transformed his working life and that he wishes he could have been managed this way in his early days with the bank.

Matt Somers – Coaching Skills Training Ltd
After leaving Barclays Matt set up his first training consultancy in 1999. Called Performance Development, the firm provided training in a number of soft skills areas with courses being delivered by Matt or one of the firm's associate trainers.

However in 2000 Matt realised that his interest and experience in coaching skills for managers was not being put to good use and he decided to realign the firm to concentrate mainly in this area.

At the same time Matt undertook a Masters degree in Human Resource Development with the University of Sunderland where he researched coaching in a contact centre environment for his dissertation.

In 2002, Matt's first book, Coaching in a Week was published by Hodder and Stoughton. This was followed by Coaching at Work (Wiley, 2006), Instant Manager: Coaching (Hodder, 2008) and Bullet Guide: Coaching (Hodder 2011). A second edition of Coaching in a Week was published by Hodder in 2012.