Sarah Ilyas

I am fascinated by human behaviour and experience; in particular, I’m interested in the way that our private and professional lives intersect and the impact that our work can have on our personal happiness and fulfilment and vice versa.        

It was this fascination and desire to make people’s working lives better which attracted me to employment law in the first place. During my early career in legal practice, I represented mostly individuals, in a number of discrimination and other contentious claims which ended up in tribunal. I quickly came to the realisation that this work was rarely rewarding, taking a huge emotional and financial toll on my clients, regardless of the outcome and often leaving me with a feeling of despair.

I subsequently spent the last 10 years in a non-practising role, working as a Legal Editor for Practical Law, writing and maintaining employment law materials for the know-how website used by legal and HR professionals. In this role, I remained at the forefront of the law, dealing with topical issues and drafting forward-thinking policies and materials for lawyers advising their clients on how to avoid or manage conflict. While I found this work enjoyable, it didn’t satisfy my urge to actively influence positive change in workplaces and I decided to undertake an MSc in Organisational Psychology to complement my legal experience and provide an academic grounding in workplace psychology.

I want to combine my years of experience as a lawyer, my psychology knowledge and my personal lived experience as a woman from an ethnic background, who has overcome cultural and societal pressures in my professional life to create learning opportunities for others. I believe that everyone should be able to prosper and succeed in a nurturing, kind and fair work environment and I am incredibly excited to work as a Facilitator at byrne.dean where I have the opportunity to actively help employers create such a culture.

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