A small, expert-led programme for senior professionals who are ready for their next appointment and want to arrive there as the most credible, compelling version of themselves.
You have built a significant career.
You have led teams, delivered results, and carried real responsibility in complex organisations. You know what you are capable of.
And yet something is not translating.
The applications that should be landing are not landing. The conversations that should be opening doors are not opening them. The interviews that should be yours are going to someone else.
In thirty years of senior recruitment and executive search, I have seen this pattern more times than I can count. Gifted, experienced professionals who cannot make the external market read them at the level they have actually reached.
The gap is not what you have done.
It is how clearly you can make others see it.
Senior Appointments Masterclass
Why this is harder than it should be
Most senior professionals find it genuinely hard to talk about themselves.
Not because they lack substance. Because at this level, nothing is ever done alone. Every result was a collaboration. Every outcome involved a team, a board, a set of stakeholders, a moment of organisational complexity that took years to navigate.
How do you take that and put it into a sixty second introduction? A three page CV? A forty five minute panel interview?
Some people have been interviewed enough times that it becomes fluid. They have learned the language through repetition.
But many of the most capable leaders I have worked with are the ones who find it hardest. Particularly those who have had something knock their confidence along the way. A restructure that felt personal. A leadership change that did not see them clearly. A role that ended before they were ready.
Those experiences do not diminish what you have built.
But they do make it harder to stand in front of a panel and speak about your own impact with clarity and conviction.
That is exactly what this programme exists to change.
Who I am and why this is different
My name is Heather I’anson.
For more than thirty years I worked inside senior recruitment and executive search, finding leaders for complex, high stakes organisations. I was not on the outside looking in. I was in the room where appointment decisions were made. I wrote the interview questions. I designed the stakeholder events. I shortlisted the candidates, delivered the feedback, and communicated the decision outcomes. I understood, from every angle of the process, what made one candidate land and another fall short.
I have also navigated my own career transitions. I know what it costs to do some of your best work in a place that never quite saw you clearly. I know the particular disorientation of leaving a role where your identity was legible and stepping into the space between what you were and what you are becoming.
That experience is not separate from my work. It is the heart of it.
When I work with your CV, your applications, your interview preparation, and your introductions, I am doing something most career coaches cannot do. I am reading your material through the eyes of someone who has sat on the other side of the table for three decades and knows exactly what a panel notices, what a recruiter responds to, and what makes a senior leader land as the obvious choice.
What the Senior Appointments Masterclass is
This is not a course you work through alone.
It is a small, deliberately curated group of directors, chief officers, and board-level candidates, meeting weekly over twelve weeks, with an expert in the room who knows your sector, understands the appointment process from the inside, and has her eyes on your actual material throughout.
There are no more than eight people in each cohort. That is deliberate. At this level you need to be seen and responded to as an individual, not processed as part of a group. The people in the room with you are navigating the same level of transition. Their questions will be your questions. Their challenges will resonate with your own. The peer dynamic at this level is part of what makes the work land.
Every session follows the same pattern. You complete pre-work before we meet: a course module, an AI prompt exercise, or a framework to apply to your own material. That means the live session is not used for information transfer. It is used for my thinking, applied to your specific situation, with the whole cohort learning from the room.
Nothing in your final interview should feel unfamiliar. By the time you get there, you will have been in that room with me already.
Before the programme begins
Before Week 1, every participant completes two things. These are not optional extras. They are the foundation the whole programme builds on.
Career Clarity Session
A 90-minute structured conversation to establish the ideal role you are navigating toward and the conditions in which you do your best work. You leave with your Career Compass, a personal document you will return to throughout the programme whenever you are weighing an opportunity or a decision.
CV Impact Audit
A structured expert review of your existing CV using the Experience Impact Model, Skills in Action, and my personal profile methodology. You receive a written report with specific feedback and suggested rewrites. We begin Week 1 knowing exactly what your CV currently says and what it needs to say.
Four threads that run throughout
Four things run underneath every session rather than belonging to a single week. They are introduced early and returned to constantly because they affect everything.
Healthy search rhythm
Research as a discipline
UVP as a living thread
Gravitas work
The healthy search rhythm matters more than most people realise. LinkedIn doom scrolling is one of the most common ways a senior job search becomes emotionally destructive. Three lots of fifteen minutes a week if you are in work. A maximum of forty five minutes a day if you are not. This structure is introduced in Week 1 and maintained throughout.
The twelve week journey
Week 1: How to introduce yourself - The signature UVP. The fit UVP. Why everyone gets this wrong and how to get it right. Your introduction for networking, LinkedIn, and the first thirty seconds of every interview and stakeholder conversation.
Week 2: CV masterclass - The Experience Impact Model (EIM), Skills in Action, and personal profile methodology. How to write a CV that shows what changed because you were there, not what you were responsible for. Building on your CV Impact Audit pre-work.
Week 3: Applications that land - Covering letters, supporting statements, and expressions of interest: the three types, the contemporary structure, and the most common mistake. Writing about yourself rather than the organisation you want to join. The dating analogy applied to applications.
Week 4: LinkedIn and visibility - The spider web networking strategy. How to be visible to the people who make appointments without performing constantly. The search rhythm applied to LinkedIn specifically. How most senior appointments are actually made.
Week 5: Initial conversations - The four different people in the room and what each is assessing simultaneously. The three questions protocol: how to research them, how to ask them, how to close the conversation well. Pre-session support: I check your questions before the call.
Week 6: STARR and evidence - The STARR model with two Rs. The essay structure that solves the most common interview failure: too long on situation, too thin on result, no relevance. The second R, relevance, is where board-level appointments are won and lost. Connecting your evidence to the organisation you want to join.
Week 7: Competency frameworks - How to decode any framework you encounter. The I’anson Burns Leadership Competency Framework: eight competencies, four levels of behavioural progression. How to map your evidence and level-test your answers for director and board level appointments specifically.
Week 8: Interview Playbook - The full matrix of interview preparation. Universal themes that appear in every senior process: EDI, values, development areas, difficult career history, and what panels are really assessing in each. Performance mindset and interview nerves.
Week 9: Interview Intensive - Live interview development practice with tailored questions prepared specifically for your roles. Diagnostic feedback on structure, evidence, level, and presence. This is the Interview Intensive applied to your live process.
Week 10: Stakeholder events - Where stakeholder sessions sit in the appointment process and what they are actually assessing. How to navigate informal but pivotal conversations with multiple stakeholders simultaneously. How to own the room without performing. Built from Heather’s own experience designing and running stakeholder events.
Week 11: Presentations to panels - The brand mirror principle. The so what test applied to every slide and every statement. How to structure a leadership presentation that demonstrates strategic thinking rather than information delivery. Handling challenge from a panel.
Week 12: Graduation and next steps
We look back at where you started and how far you have come. We celebrate the ratio shift in your applications, conversations, and interviews. We consolidate your ongoing strategy, agree your next steps, and make sure you leave with momentum rather than a certificate.
Between sessions
The live sessions are only part of what is included.
Between sessions I have my eyes on your material before it goes anywhere. This is named, structured support, not informal extras.
CV reviews - ELEVATE applied to your live applications
Application reviews - Covering letters and supporting statements
Question checking - Your three questions before initial conversations
Interview Intensive preparation - Tailored questions for your live roles and processes
After the twelve weeks
For participants whose search continues beyond the programme, alumni membership is available. A fortnightly drop-in, WhatsApp access, and discounted rates on additional CV reviews, Interview Intensive sessions, and strategy calls. The container stays open while you need it.
What changes when the work is done
Hema came to me having applied for role after role with no response at all. No callbacks. No conversations. Just silence. After we worked together on her CV and how she was presenting herself to the market, that changed. She became significantly more selective, stopped applying for roles that were not right for her, and began building her consultancy work with far greater clarity and confidence.
Lisa was getting interviews but something was not landing. After we worked together she said something I have not forgotten. She told me she finally sounded like a better version of herself. She went on to gain clarity on her next career move, celebrate her areas of strength, and secure a new leadership role.
Here is what others have said about working with me.
“At a time when I was feeling uncertain and lost, Heather brought clarity, structure, and a renewed sense of confidence into my process. Her ability to identify my strengths, refine my narrative, and elevate my interview skills made a real difference. Most importantly, Heather played a key role in helping me secure my dream job.”
Juliana
“I connected with Heather to seek coaching to support me in considering my next career options. As a result of the support I have had clarity on my next career move, celebrated my areas of strength, which has led to trying something new as a fractional consultant, and more recently securing a new leadership role.”
Lisa
“The advice felt absolutely tailored to my ambition and the reality of the current job market. I immediately applied all of Heather’s suggestions and have seen a measurable change in my application to interview success rate.”
Stephen
The pattern I see most often is this. The ratio shifts. Applications that were going nowhere start generating conversations. Conversations that were going nowhere start generating interviews. Interviews that were going nowhere start generating offers.
Not because anything fundamental changed about who these people are.
Because the market could finally read them at the level they had actually reached.
The investment
The Senior Appointments Masterclass is £950 for twelve weeks.
This includes the Career Clarity Session and CV Impact Audit as onboarding, twelve weekly live sessions with a curated cohort of no more than eight participants, pre-work materials before each session, my personal review of your CV and applications throughout, tailored question preparation for your live roles, Interview Intensive sessions, question checking before initial conversations, WhatsApp support, and full access to my frameworks, AI prompts, and career tools including the Interview Playbook, ELEVATE, the Experience Impact Model, Skills in Action, and the I’anson Burns Leadership Competency Framework.
A single director or board-level appointment is worth years of salary. This investment is not in a course. It is in getting the next chapter right.
Payment can be made in full or in three instalments.
Places are limited to eight per cohort and filled by application.
Your next step
If this resonates, the next step is to apply for a discovery conversation.
This is a private thirty minute call where we explore where you are now, what is not yet landing, and what you are ready to step into next. It is also an opportunity for both of us to assess whether this is the right fit.
To apply, I ask you to share one recent CV or application with me before we speak. Not because I will judge it, but because seeing your material in advance means I can arrive at our conversation with something useful to say. In my experience, that is where the real conversation begins.
If we are the right fit, I will invite you to join the next cohort.
If we are not, I will tell you honestly and point you towards what I think would serve you better.
You do not need to become someone new.
You need to become fully legible as the leader you have already become.
© 2026 Heather I’anson. All Rights Reserved.