Out-of-the-box Learning & Development
Management & Operations
Our Management & Operations team consists of:
· (a) our Executive Director & our co-founder Faye Orfanou who is also our Chief Strategy Officer
· (b) our Executive Product & Operations Officer Konstantina Koutsioumpa
The quality of our operation and compliance to our code of ethics is audited by our co-founder Sofia Makri, currently a Career Development professional with a corporate career, who acts in AELIA with a supervisory role as Chief Quality & Ethics Auditor.
Our 7-member Strategy Board, consisting of experienced professionals, provides strategic guidance and supports in key issues of strategy and management.
Konstantina Koutsioumpa is a dynamic professional with a deep-rooted passion for cross-cultural communication and people development, while at the same time an avid learner of technology and an innovation geek.
She is the Executive Product & Operations Officer at AELIA, leading the coordination of the product design and product implementation teams and monitoring operational plans. She has been operating AELIA’s learning & development projects and offering L&D instruction and guidance services, initially in parallel to her former career as a linguist and project manager for international translation projects and more intensively since 2022.
Konstantina has been a hands-on project manager in people development projects within AELIA, managing relationships across teams and networks of diverse people, while she has also served as an L&D Instructor, guiding and inspiring her beneficiaries and striving to make the best out of people.
Moreover, she is the Co-Founder and Head of Learning & Development of Science-2-Business, an organisation which supports and empowers sciencepreneurs in their commercialisation efforts and fosters capacity building for researchers and R&D corporate officers embarking on the science-to-business journey. In 2023, Konstantina joined forces with Faye and other “aelian” L&D Instructors to found Science 2 Business, whereby she has contributed in multiple capacity building projects for aspiring entrepreneurs, as well as researchers at leading research centres in Greece.
Konstantina is a linguist by education, with executive studies in Learning & Development and Innovation Management. Her relationship with learning & development began as soon as she joined and benefited from a capacity building programme of AELIA when the organisation was still operating as a social venture, thus experiencing first-hand the immense impact capacity building can make on someone’s life. She gradually developed a passion for learning & development, which later resulted in her becoming a learning & development project manager and instructor at AELIA.
Her initial career was in translation and localisation services. She is a linguistics graduate of the Ionian University (translation studies), with graduate studies at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz as well.
Soon after her studies, she embarked on a freelance career as a medical translator and later joined a boutique translation agency as an in-house translator and reviewer, where she mostly translated technical and marketing materials for multinational corporations in the automotive and IT industries. After 3+ years, her eagerness to constantly learn and grow led her to one of the most well-established translation agencies in Greece and north-eastern Europe, where she served as a translation project manager for major accounts.
She is a quick and constant learner, always on the lookout for her next challenge. She is an avid traveller, she loves to read about technology and innovation (mostly engineering and IT), and she is a huge fan of astrophysics.
Faye is a multidisciplinary professional combining an activity in technology transfer & innovation management, a well-founded legal background (with a former career as business lawyer) and a wide-ranging experience in learning & development (L&D design, L&D instructor, trainer, mentor) within AELIA and beyond since 2006.
Faye is the Executive Director and Chief Strategy Officer of AELIA, leading the way in the new era of AELIA, as AELIA evolves from a welfare organization into a learning & development agency.
Faye co-founded AELIA in 2013 together with Sofia Makri, as a welfare organization, with an ardour to support people in their employability, in their transition from education to worklife, their lifelong learning, and their professional development path. Ever since, AELIA had supported people of all ages, social groups and professional backgrounds in remote areas, small and big islands, in towns and cities across Greece.
Founding AELIA was the inevitable next step for Faye after a 3-year career as a policy maker for Education, Lifelong learning & Research as Special Secretary for EU funds in the Ministry of Education & Research (2009-2012). Even though she pursued a career in technology transfer and innovation management after her government position, founding AELIA was the way to invest her energy and knowledge to an area so close to her heart, corresponding to her natural calling to guide and mentor people and her passion for cognitive science.
In AELIA, Faye has been designing capacity building (learning & development) programs for skills building, employability acceleration & entrepreneurship, which combined training, mentoring, networking and guided -learning-on-the-job projects, for professionals as well as for entrepreneurs, in 6 diverse industries. She has designed 22 types of learning experiences, in 14 thematic areas and has been trainer in more than 500 workshops training over 1000 people & learning experiences, she has mentored over 200 people and more than 50 entrepreneurial ventures.
Moreover, Faye has been exploring the world of learning & development, constantly studying neuroscience, human resources development and exploring state-of-the-art practices, leading her to develop specific methodological tools and practices for AELIA in learning and development. She is a dedicated learner on cognitive science and neuroscience, while also passionate for strategic design thinking.
Faye is a fluent speaker of 6 languages, with a citizen-of-the-world mindset, having studied in Greece, Germany and the UK. Her graduate and postgraduate studies were in law and she has had executive training in innovation management and business strategy.
In parallel with AELIA, Faye is an active tech transfer professional. She is also the co-founder & administrating partner of Science-2-Business, a non-profit organization which supports scientists, sciencepreneurs and Universities in the process from lab into market as well as companies pursuing innovation.
Overall, Faye has had an intensive career path, which passed through consulting firms, law firms, public policy and research organizations. She also had attempted a consulting firm venture, experiencing a knowledge-rewarding business failure. Her path led her to technology transfer and innovation development, as advisor to major Greek research institutions eg Demokritos Research Centre, National Technical University, University of Crete, Agricultural University, Athens University for Economics & Business & as associate expert for Grant Thornton Greece (2014-2020). becoming a pioneer in the Greek tech transfer ecosystem and a national expert, appointed for 2nd tenure member of the national Sectoral Council for IP and Tech Transfer.