Our Company

OnBoard Consulting's Principal Consultant: Dr David Robson (BSc DipEd MEdAdmin PhD MACE AMACEL)

David is concerned about staff members in all kinds of organisations whose performance is up for review. As a principal, he would have welcomed a performance review system that allowed him to make an independent assessment of staff, particularly those who were seeking promotion, or about to have their contracts renewed. It was with this in mind that he began to develop the OnBoard Consulting review; it is specifically designed for CEOs and Boards who need to be proactive in the assessment of staff.

David Robson is confident that the OnBoard Consulting approach is relevant and helpful to organisations in general and to individual staff members in particular. He acknowledges, however, that the process itself is continually being refined; he foresees a number of developments in the next few years, including the appointment of staff specializing in selected areas of review. He is grateful for any feedback that clients wish to give.

David Robson's involvement in organisations as a consultant stems from 35 years' experience as a teacher in both Education Department and Private Schools, including 5 years as a Science Senior and over 7 years as a Principal. He has taught in both Government and Private schools in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, as well as serving as a Board member at two private schools.

In 1998, he completed a Master's degree in Educational Administration at the University of Queensland. Areas of interest included Systems' Analysis and Leadership for Educational Reform. He completed (2006) a PhD thesis through the School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Mount Gravatt, on the topic 'Change in Governance Procedure'. As part of the preparation for this study, he explored the literature on Change Theory and two of its subsets: Implementation and Innovation Theory. He used Grounded Theory methods (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) to augment analysis of the research data. David's PhD was supervised by Professor Neil Dempster and Adjunct Professor Roger Hunter. Insights and expertise gained as a result of these professional activities have equipped him to work as a consultant in a wide range of organisational contexts.

David has also been 'on the receiving end' of the review process, having experienced reviews while employed as a Principal in private schools. On one of these occasions he was reviewed by an independent reviewer appointed by the School Board who took a very selective approach; he was only interested in David's performance against a strict list of criteria. David was left with the impression that this person had only gained a very limited view of his performance as a principal; the review felt incomplete and not fairly representative of the effort and outcomes of the previous year's work. The quality of information gained from a review of this kind was generally poor, and not fit for use in decision-making applications, either for decisions involving David, personally, or for those about broader school matters. This experience, and others, has spurred him on to look for ways of reviewing that reliably deliver high quality information about performance.