About Us
"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things"
| Henry Miller"
Joanna Smit - Founder
From the start, Joanna has had encounters with multiple countries and languages. She grew up multi-lingually and multi-nationally, and has lived and worked in her native Luxembourg, Germany, France, Spain and the UK.
Joanna has a decade of experience in investment banking and SME finance across several European countries.
Her responsibilities as a Salesperson in International Bond Markets at Citigroup included sales pitches, presentations, negotiations and trade executions of multi-million pound deals with investment or funding officials.
These officials were from both the public and private sector such as central banks, ministries of finance, asset managers and pension funds from several countries worldwide.
Joanna has always made time for languages & international work experience (e.g. the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Congo, Italy and the Netherlands) and speaks 7 languages.
She started her B.Sc. in Economics at University College London (UK) aged 16 and has multiple cross-cultural training qualifications.
She set up Smit Training in 2016 having identified a gap within cross-cultural training providers:
a lack of practitioners with first-hand experience of the world
in which corporate clients operate.
Smit Training's courses therefore cater to the ‘the high-calibre client’smindset’ – e.g. by using a data-based approach, demonstrating a clear link to business performance and addressing relevant professional situations.
You can read more about these principles in the section Our Values.