Meet the Nelson Training Team

A Passion For Training

Training that people want to go to…

We have come a long way since it all started in 2001 and Nelson Training was conceived to eliminate all the major turn-off’s on a training course. It’s time to share what the Nelson Training team have learned with you. This website is to inspire you, inform you, and help you make the right decisions about your training, conference, film, or e-learning.

Since we started we have had bags of fun, learned shed loads, and made lots of mistakes but along the way we’ve tried to create the best quality and best value drama based training company in the UK. That’s it….but there’s so much more to it than that ..

It’s creative and great fun designing training sessions with you and for you, especially when harnessing it to performing arts! What is more challenging, yet essential is making it ‘stick’, making it ‘work’, and then measuring the results ..and that’s where we can help you. It’s all very well having the ‘wow’ effect on the training if (heaven forbid!) staff go straight back to work and do exactly what they did before.

Training must be an investment for your organisation, not a cost and our job is to help you make it just that.

Meet the Nelson Training team

Viv Nelson
Managing Director

I came to drama-based training rather late in life after spending many years in teaching and training. I had always wanted to be a teacher but got rejected from 8 teacher training colleges when I was 18 so I abandoned that plan and studied instead for an HND in Business Studies in Flintshire College of Technology. On my first day I met a chemistry student called Jon Mortimer and got married 3 years later!

Following the HND, I read social science at University College Cardiff gaining a 2:1 and not content with spending taxpayers’ money to study, went straight to Warwick University and got my first masters degree in industrial relations.

Following 3 years working for the (then) Central Electricity Generating Board, I began working as a lecturer. Solihull College was where I was to spend the next 18 years … lecturer, head of department and training consultant. Along the way, I picked up two more masters degrees: M.Sc in Training from Leicester University and then an M.Ed from the Open University. I am currently studying Performance Studies at Worcester, since I have been harnessing it for training purposes since 1998!

My quest is to make training fun, to make it stick and to make it pay for itself! Along the way I have been very lucky in working with a great bunch of actors and of course Jon………. It’s what makes the Nelson Training team work!

Jon Mortimer
Director & Company Secretary

I met Viv on her first day at Flintshire College in 1972. I was studying chemistry there whilst working for ICI. We both went on to University College Cardiff after we got married as it was somewhere that would take us both. I gained my PhD there and went on to work for the Coal Research Establishment.
After this I began lecturing in the department of Mathematics and Computing at the University of the West of England where I gained a Professorship and ran two major European Union projects

Following this I went on to act as consultant to venture capital companies supporting technology based businesses and was Campus Ventures Visiting Fellow to Manchester University. Whilst there, I developed their business management training programme for high technology companies and went on to work with the development of a number of technology based businesses. In my spare time I picked up an MA in music from Birmingham Conservatoire which has come in handy for writing the music for Nelson Training videos.

I joined Viv three years after Nelson Training team started, as it evolved to the training company it is today. During this time, I also studied film at the University of Bristol School of Drama which enabled us to develop video and e-learning production within the company.

Over the last 10 years I’ve become increasingly interested in diversity and inclusion issues in the workplace and have developed courses in workplace equality with particular reference to the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty. I’ve also developed effective drama based programmes in tackling bullying and harassment which have been widely taken up.

Nicola Rozier
Office Manager

Nicola is everyone’s first point of contact at Nelson Training.

The Nelson Training team’s amazing office manager, she emails and calls all the customers, arranges the actors and makes sure they know where to go, manages Viv and Jon (an epic task in its own right!), keeps the accounts and the diary and ensures everything runs smoothly.

An ACCA and BA Econ (London) she has been with us for the last fourteen years.