Jane Datta

Advisory Board Member

Jane is a human resources leader with more than thirty years of experience creating healthy and engaged workplaces, identifying workforce risks and opportunities, and implementing technological and data-driven solutions. She recently established JCD Advisory which specializes in helping leaders understand and analyze workforce trends and organizational needs, and create strategic workforce plans for ensuring they have talent for near-term and future missions. Jane is also a senior fellow for human capital with The Conference Board, serving on their steering committee for the Federal Government Council.

In 2023 Jane retired from NASA as the chief human capital officer where she was responsible for building the talent for supporting the agency’s mission, delivering out-of-this-world human resources services, and shaping NASA’s culture to maintain high employee engagement. Jane embraces that “we are people leaders in the people business” which guided her oversight of NASA’s human capital policies, practices, and operations. One of her most rewarding achievements at NASA was overseeing the transformation of decentralized human capital services across ten centers to a centralized line of business.

Prior to NASA, Jane was a human resources consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, and held multiple human resources roles at United Technologies Corporation.

Jane holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a BA in music from Yale University. She was a 2022 Presidential Rank Award recipient – Meritorious Executive, the highest award for federal government employees, bestowed on a select group of the Senior Executive Service for exceptional performance.

Dr Nicola Watts

Advisory Board Member

Nicola has extensive global and local experience across many sectors – as a consultant, adviser, educator, board member and senior manager. In a time of unprecedented change and disruption, Nicola is acutely aware of the challenges of identifying and building skills for an equitable future that supports shared benefit. She is highly skilled in Strategy, Clustering, Smart Specialisation, Social Impact, Business Resilience, Systems Thinking, Governance, Capacity Building and Collective Leadership.

Rebekah French

Advisory Board Member

Rebekah French is a Senior Associate in Arnold Bloch Leibler’s Workplace Advisory group. She provides commercial advice on all aspects of employment law, including complex and sensitive litigation matters.

With over 10 years’ experience helping clients navigate the challenges that come from managing employees. Her experience is broad, including recruitment, government, industry and private practice.

Regarded for her clear and commercial advice, Rebekah works with clients across a number of industries, including media, finance, manufacturing, hospitality, retail, construction and not-for-profit. She has worked on a number of high-profile matters including those relating to large scale restructures, complex employment litigation and employment aspects of sensitive business acquisitions.

Before joining Arnold Bloch Leibler in 2019, Rebekah was a Senior Associate at Norton Rose Fulbright, which included a secondment to a Victorian Government department.

Rebekah holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Business (Human Resource Management). In 2013, she graduated from Monash University with a Master of Laws.

Nick Kennedy

Chair – The Workforce Planning Institute

Nick has over 20 years of experience, including strategic and operational workforce planning, project and program management, change leadership and global talent management. This is complimented by a strong aptitude for continuous improvement, supported by experience across sectors including, government, mining and resources, automotive, consulting and minerals processing.

Having managed strategic workforce planning and organisational design teams for large global organisations and overseen major change and optimisation programs, Nick has a deep understanding of the complex challenges faced by many organisations. He holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering and is passionate about connecting strategy, planning and people.

Nick has significant experience designing strategic workforce planning solutions across local, state and federal government clients and is an accomplished trainer and workshop facilitator. Nick has designed and facilitated public and in-house training in strategic workforce planning, workforce data & analytics, and capability mapping for clients in the state and federal government sectors across Australia.

Nick is also a current Board Member of Triathlon Victoria.