Jock Noble – Capability Statement

Performance

My 12 years with World Vision has all been focused on livelihoods and economic development initiatives in communities that are poor. In livelihoods my experience ranges from working directly in communities, alongside our development facilitators, supporting and mentoring our specialist livelihoods coordinators and managers and working with Operations and Ministry Quality management and teams. I have worked in nearly 30 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern, East and West Africa and taken multiyear secondments in Kenya, Armenia and Indonesia.

As part of my work I have developed and designed programs, worked on grant applications,  hired, supported and mentored livelihood staff and sometimes filled in as a National Office’s Livelihoods Coordinator.

I consider myself a prachademic, combining solid academic international development, livelihoods and strategy theory with hard won, lived field experience.

In 2006 I established World Vision Australia’s Social Entrepreneurship and Economic Development ( SEED ) unit from scratch and ran it for over 7 years. During that time I conceived and developed the project models for Business Facilitation (2007) LVCD (2009) Micro-Franchising ( 2011) SKYE and IMPACT Clubs (2013) as well as the PALS e-learning concept (2011).

Following my work with World Vision Australia I joined World Vision International and spent 4 years in MEER developing evidence building frameworks for these models in some of the toughest environments anywhere.

Before joining World Vision I spent  20 years building NGOs and Social Enterprises and developing strategies to increase their competitiveness. For fifteen of these years I personally started 7 social enterprises. These ranged from a furniture company that employed over 100 homeless youth to establishing the world’s largest diversity and inclusion consultancy providing services to leading organisations (such as IBM, BHP Billiton, BP and National Starch, Chemical Company as well as Australian State and Federal Government departments) to help them include people facing barriers to employment, particularly Indigenous Australians and people with a disability.

Core Competencies

 Program design and Grant Acquisition and integration with Technical Approaches and Programs, Business Model Development, Business Model Canvass, Patterns of Strategy, partnering and negotiation.

• Program design, development, integration and training in economic development including; markets development and LVCD, small business development and entrepreneurship including Business Facilitation, Micro-franchising and self-employment
• Labor market programs including employment, employability and Vocational Education and Training (VET) for people facing barriers to employment particular youth, women and people with a disability.
• Integration of youth models into programing particularly SKYE and IMPACT
• Agricultural livelihoods approaches including reframing small farms as businesses, Permaculture home gardens and Graduation Approaches
• Design including Theories of Change and Theories of Action, Design Thinking and ideation, Action Research and Action Learning
• Strategic Foresight and developing strategies and approaches that are most likely to deliver a “preferred” future.
• Strategy Development that focus on sustainability and building competitive advantage

I hold Masters Degrees in:

• Entrepreneurship and Innovation and
• Strategic Foresight.

As well as a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Management and Negotiation

I have been faculty lecturer with the America University in Armenia for the subject Entrepreneurship and Innovation

I have published two books: Stories from the Road (2015) and Postcards: What am I doing here?

As well as coauthoring the training package Opening the door to employment for people with disabilities : a skill development program for employment professionals (2000) and the achademic paper “Are workers with a disability less productive or less understood – An_empirical_investigation from an entrepreneurial business planning perspective ( 1999)”

In 2007 I was the annual awardee of The Carey Medal in recognition of exceptional and outstanding service to the Australian community.