Yanina Lebedeva, PhD
Learning and Leadership Development Consultant | Leadership Psychologist
I am a senior L&D professional and organisational consultant with 12+ years of experience building and leading learning and talent systems in large, distributed organisations.
Most of my career was spent at EPAM Systems, where I grew from Learning & Development Manager to Head of L&D EMEA — scaling the function across 10+ European locations serving 20,000+ employees — and later led the global People Programs portfolio as Senior Manager, with enterprise-wide scope across 60,000+ people.
I now work independently — partnering with organisations as a learning architect and talent development consultant, and working with senior leaders and entrepreneurs as a psychologist focused on leadership effectiveness, burnout, and professional identity.
Based in Budapest, Hungary. EU work authorization. Open to remote and hybrid engagements across Europe.
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12+
years in L&D leadership at senior level
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60,000+
employees in scope at enterprise level
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800+
coaching sessions for leaders delivered
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10+
locations where L&D was built or scaled
Selected Work
Over 12 years at EPAM Systems, I built the EMEA L&D function from a single-contributor setup to a distributed regional team, designed and led end-to-end leadership pipelines from first-time manager programmes to senior leadership acceleration, overseeing the organisation's first enterprise-wide succession management system, and led a global performance management redesign across 60,000+ employees.
The work consistently produced measurable outcomes — from 80%+ learning participation rates to ~30% reduction in manager review time to Learning Technologies Award (UK) recognition.
What Makes My Work Different
Most L&D professionals come from training, instructional design, or HR. My foundation is psychology — specifically, the psychology of how people develop, change, and sustain performance under pressure.
I hold a PhD in Social Psychology, am a certified coach (International Coaches Union), and have delivered 800+ individual coaching sessions over my career, working with leaders on role transitions, burnout, leadership effectiveness, and professional identity.
In practice, this means that when I design a leadership programme or a talent system, I am thinking not only about learning objectives and delivery formats — but about what actually drives and blocks human behaviour, how identity shapes performance, and what conditions allow people to change, not just comply.
For organisations, this translates into learning architectures that are psychologically informed and behaviourally grounded. For individual leaders, it means working with someone who understands the inner mechanics of high achievement — not just its outputs.
Work with me
I am currently available for senior L&D and organisational development engagements — as a consultant, interim leader, or embedded partner — working remotely or hybrid across Europe.
If you are an organisation looking to build or strengthen your learning and talent capability, or a senior leader looking for individual coaching grounded in psychology and real leadership experience, I would be glad to have a direct conversation.