Dr. Marilyn Buckner is President of National Training Systems (NTS), where she designs systems and innovative interventions to help organizations increase their effectiveness. She provides consulting and training on leadership assessment/development, succession planning, performance management, change management, supervisory/management training, and career development. She provides a wide-range of organizational effectiveness consulting services for organizations in change, including strategic planning, organizational design, vision/mission development, and team building.

A key specific area of focus in her practice is leadership assessment and development that includes executive assessment, assessment centers and executive coaching. As a distributor of Hogan Assessments and Decision Dynamics StylesView, she provides certification workshops on these valid predictive selection and leadership assessments.

Before starting NTS over a decade ago, Dr. Buckner worked at a nationwide consulting firm, where she led the change management practice and designed consulting and training products leadership development, strategic planning, vision/mission development, team building, organizational design and change management.

Before going into consulting, she was Director of Strategic Planning and Human Resources Development for National Data Corporation—a provider of information systems to retail, medical, telecommunications, and financial industries. She was responsible for executive and management development, strategic planning, sales training and quality training.

Previously, she was the manager of corporate and international human resources development for The Coca-Cola Company, where she was responsible for the development of several human resource development systems including succession, staffing, leadership development and performance appraisal. Her experience in a corporate environment as well as international and domestic divisions has given her a broad perspective regarding issues and problems in implementing changes in a variety of functions.

Dr. Buckner has a Ph.D. in Counseling and Management from Georgia State University. She is the past Chair of the Board of the Human Resource Planning Society a worldwide group of human resource executives.  She is a frequent speaker on the subjects of change management, leadership development and succession planning at conferences for the HRPS, the American Society of Training and Development Association, and the Society for Human Resources Management. She has published articles and chapters in books on the topics of succession planning. She taught at the University of Central Florida in the Leadership Institute.