Meet the team
Invite our thought leaders to bring the conversation to your event.
People behind L&D Leaders
Book our team for keynotes, panels, or podcasts on collaborative learning, facilitation, and the future of L&D.
Your audience will leave with fresh ideas, practical takeaways, and inspiration to make learning a shared, everyday practice.
Hanna Liimatainen
Hanna hosts the L&D Leaders Podcast, where she leads honest conversations with experienced leaders and influencers working in L&D. Known for her ability to ask the questions that get beneath the surface Hanna explores not just what's working, but why it works and how others can apply it in their own context.
Hanna speaks about creating belonging at work, women in leadership, and transforming learning from something delivered to something people co-create together. With a background in communications, systemic thinking and digital facilitation, Hanna has spent her career helping organizations reimagine how people work, lead, and learn in practice.
What makes her memorable is her ability to make people feel both challenged and supported. Whether in a podcast, workshop, or keynote, Hanna leaves audiences with fresh perspectives and concrete steps they can take into their own workplaces.
Emilia Åström
Emilia Åström facilitates the L&D Leaders community where she brings together senior learning professionals to exchange experiences and experiment with new ways of driving change through collaborative learning. Known for her calm, creative presence, Emilia designs spaces where people feel safe to share, reflect, and act together.
Emilia speaks about how collaborative learning and community can accelerate transformation from the inside out. With a background in learning experience design, design thinking, facilitation, and community building, she spent a decade pioneering online facilitation and hybrid collaboration practices that helped organizations build learning and innovation cultures and turning learning into living, social systems.
Having lived and worked across South and North America and Europe, she brings an international perspective to how people learn, collaborate, and lead change. Whether on stage or in a workshop, she leaves audiences inspired to reimagine learning not as something delivered, but as something created together.
Ilkka Mäkitalo
Ilkka is the Co-Founder and a Chief Evangelist of Howspace – the Collaborative Learning & Enablement Platform providing the L&D Leaders Community.
With a background in education and over 20 years in organizational development, Ilkka Mäkitalo saw early on that most training was a one-way street. He noticed that while information was being shared, people were rarely truly involved in the process. That gap inspired his work on collaborative learning: building capability through dialogue, participation, and shared sense-making in the flow of everyday work.
To address this, Ilkka has spent more than 10 years leading product development at Howspace. By building AI into the platform, he helps organizations drive social learning at scale. His goal is to use technology to amplify human input and connection rather than replacing it.
Known as a visionary leader and big band conductor, Ilkka uses storytelling to bring these principles to life. He leaves audiences with a fresh perspective, a new language for the dynamics they see in their organizations, and the momentum to involve people in the work that matters most.
Looking for a speaker for your next event or podcast?
Ilkka Mäkitalo
Emilia Åström is a learning experience designer, facilitator, and community builder who helps organizations turn learning into living, social systems. As the initiator of the L&D Leaders community, she brings together senior learning professionals to exchange experiences and experiment with new ways of learning, showing how community can accelerate transformation from the inside out.
Before joining Howspace, she spent a decade pioneering online facilitation and hybrid collaboration practices that helped organizations build learning and innovation cultures. Having lived and worked across South and North America and Europe, she brings an international perspective to how people learn, collaborate, and lead change.
Known for her calm, creative presence, Emilia designs spaces where people feel safe to share, reflect, and act together. Whether on stage or in a workshop, she leaves audiences inspired to reimagine learning not as something delivered, but as something created together.