About The People Advisory -
Meet Our Founder
Built on a decade of experience — and a simple belief that better data leads to better people decisions.
Kelly Howard, PhD
It Started With Curiosity, then it Became a Career.
I've always been fascinated by what happens between people at work — why some teams click, why some leaders inspire loyalty while others lose their best people, why the same job feels energizing to one person and completely draining to another.
That curiosity didn't just stay with me. It drove everything.
I earned my Master's degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology, then a PhD in Psychology with a concentration in Occupational Health Psychology because I wanted to understand human behavior at work at the deepest level. I wanted to measure it, explain it, and use it to make work better.
That's where the data comes in.
A Decade of Building People Solutions That Actually Work
Before founding The People Advisory, I spent over a decade as an internal consultant building talent solutions grounded in science and aligned to real business outcomes.
My work spanned nearly every dimension of the people function:
Talent assessment & selection
Interview training and design
Internal talent alignment and mobility
Employee listening and engagement
Competency modeling and career mapping
Leadership development and selection
360-degree assessments, competency-based assessments
Career and leadership coaching
What I learned shapes everything I do now:
The organizations that got people right weren't guessing. They using data to drive their people strategy.
Why I Started The People Advisory
People spend an enormous amount of their lives at work. That time deserves to mean something.
I've seen what happens when organizations get their people strategy right. Employees grow, stay, and invest. Leaders build teams they're proud of.
And the business results show it.
I've also seen what happens when they don't. When leaders hire on gut instinct and lose the wrong people, when engagement tanks and teams fall apart, when a talented professional stays stuck because no one helped them understand what they're actually good at.
It costs everyone. The business, the team, and the person sitting in the wrong seat.
That's what The People Advisory is built to fix.
I believe that better data leads to better decisions — and better decisions lead to better outcomes for businesses and the people who work in them.
Every solution starts with collecting data and is built around giving you something you can actually use.
What This Means For You
For businesses: that means better people decisions that build more successful organizations — from who you hire, to how you engage your team, to how your leaders show up.
For professionals: that means data you can use to understand yourself more clearly, lead more effectively, and build a career that actually fits who you are.