Umar Ali
Business Development
Specialist Skills
Personal Development
Experienced personal development coach and counsellor
Counselling
Winner of the Queen’s Award two years running
Philosophy
Knowledge and experience of the Person-Centred approach
Career Journey
Umar Ali is the founder of IIEPD. What started as a pet project back in 2016, Umar’s passion for professional & business development, teaching and digital marketing allowed him to set up IIEPD to empower business owners, entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and career changers in both established and emerging markets.
Umar’s career began at Sun Microsystems in 1998, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company. There, he worked with many well-known brands including Macintosh and Motorola and he managed a team of 43 IT professionals. During his time at Sun Microsystems, Umar helped the company achieve over £10 billion in revenue, which was approximately 10% of the global market share at the time.
In 2002, he decided to change career to pursue his deep-rooted passion for teaching. He became a bilingual teacher at Etruscan Primary School where he was given the creative freedom in delivering his classes to his pupils. He soon progressed to become a Senior Support Manager at The Manchester College where he nurtured the right environment to help students with special needs to realise their full potential. It was here, he discovered another passion, to empower people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And he also came across the Person-Centred Approach that was devised by the late renowned psychologist Dr Carl Rogers.
With this newfound aspiration, Umar set up Little Angels, a charity foundation that helps primary school children from disadvantaged backgrounds to realise their true potential. The foundation has helped many children enrol onto the Duke of Edinburgh and Nation Citizen Service, where the children receive a letter from the prime minister. The charity went on to win the Queen’s Award two years running in 2016 and 2017.
Umar then went on to set up another charity called the Gift Foundation that empowered orphans in developing countries by teaching them the fundamentals in technology and digital marketing so they can pursue their own entrepreneurial venture in the digital age.
Umar is also a member of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Department of International Trade and the BKN Network.
