Fin Kenneth is a Senior Consultant in 3Keel’s Climate, Nature and Resources business unit. He was one of the first consultants to take advantage of 3Keel’s sabbatical policy. After two years of working at 3Keel, a colleague can apply with six months’ notice to take three months unpaid leave, to pursue any interest.

Carole Scott, Head of Communications, interviewed Fin about his sabbatical, which he took in spring 2024.

Fin: I’ve been at 3Keel since April 2021. The sabbatical policy was in place but no one had taken one. When the staff handbook got revamped, it became more of a ‘thing’. My time was approaching and I was the second person to take one.

Carole: Tell me about the planning process.

Fin: I first started thinking about it in summer 2023 and began the sabbatical in early April 2024. It was a loose plan for a while; I was weighing up a few different options for places to go and in the autumn landed on the idea that I followed through.
It did require planning, but was relatively straightforward. The timing was quite good. It coincided with a couple of my bigger projects finishing and then there were a couple of projects or accounts that I was able to hand over to teammates. We had to think through the process, but it was pretty smooth.

Carole: What did you want to do with your sabbatical? What was the point of it?

Fin: I really wanted to just spend as much time as possible outside and have a big adventure.

Carole: Tell me about the trip!

Fin: I was in Central Asia. I spent some time in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and then the biggest chunk of time in Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia at the end. Kyrgyzstan is a country that no one really hears about. It’s ex-Soviet and has been a bit of a forgotten corner of the world for a long time, which was part of the intrigue for me. I’d heard that Kyrgyzstan is gaining popularity as an adventure tourism destination. And the Silk Road history also drew me to the region. I went to Samarkand and Bukhara, which were two of the main merchant spots along the old Silk Road, right in the middle, kind of between China and the Roman Empire.

Carole: Tell me more about Kyrgyzstan

Fin: It is an incredible country, landscape-wise. Most of it is mountainous, going up to 6,000 metres. It was also a lot more varied than I was expecting. I was a bit worried it was just going be kind of brown and treeless. But there are alpine forests, lots of lakes. There are more arid areas – deserts with canyons – but there are loads of meadows and pastures.

Most of the people there are still semi-nomadic, living in yurts. A lot of families still have livestock. In the summer it gets hot down on the plains, so they take the animals up to the high pastures at 3000 metres. So, you’ll see a whole family of eight crammed into a battered old Lada going up a rutted track into the mountains for the summer.

Kyrgyzstan is a little bit smaller than England, but the population is about 10 times less. So, there’s so much space everywhere and no one’s bothered about where you camp.

Carole: How did you manage the language barrier?

Fin: The language barrier was quite significant. They have their national languages. But everyone also speaks Russian as well. I lived my life quite a lot through Google Translate, which made it a bit difficult to have any proper conversations with people, which was a shame, because everyone wants to have a chat!

Carole: What was the highlight?

Fin: When my friend from University came out for three weeks in Kyrgyzstan. That was great. We rented a four-wheel drive, which was a lot of fun. We both had tents, so we were camping by lakes and rivers and did quite a few multi-day hikes. Camping in the mountains as well. Having the car took away a lot of the difficulty of just getting from A to B. You just have freedom to go wherever you want, especially with a four-wheel drive because you don’t even have to stick to the roads. We had a lot of laughs.

I spent the last two weeks in Georgia, where I did some amazing hikes in a region called Svaneti, which is in the northwest. It has beautiful rivers and valleys. There’s a popular four-day trek between two remote villages. Two of the days I walked on the conventional route with people and then two of the days I went off on my own to do more challenging routes.

Carole: Solo hiking – it’s not for everyone. Where did you get the confidence?

Fin: I haven’t done a lot of mountaineering in big mountains before. That was partly why I wanted to go to this area. But I have spent quite a lot of time in the mountains in Scotland. And I also just like hiking in random other places as the world. Having GPS on your phone makes everything a lot easier these days. And there are open-source maps but it’s obviously good to have a paper map as a backup.

You see things that would be harder in a group. Some of the places I was walking and camping in the mountains have wolves, bears, snow leopards as well but the most common is the marmot. I saw buzzards, eagles and vultures, and the prints of wolves and bears.

Carole: What advice would you give others who are thinking about doing a sabbatical?

Fin: If you’re in two minds about it, then definitely do it. Because you don’t get that many opportunities to do these things in life. Be as adventurous as possible because I think you make the best memories when you get out of your comfort zone a little bit.

Carole: What about any advice for planning it and making it happen?

Fin: Don’t plan too much. I bought a one-way flight and a hostel for the first two nights only. You end up meeting people who’ve been somewhere interesting or there’ll be an opportunity to travel with other people and they’ll be going in a different direction to what you had in mind. Or things are just different when you get there. For example, I was planning on going to Uzbekistan last, but I got there and the weather in Kyrgyzstan was not great and in Uzbekistan it was already getting hot. Those cities get to 50 degrees in the summer. So, I thought, oh, better to go there now. Someone I met was going there, so that worked well.

Carole: How did the break benefit you?

Fin: Having time off and not thinking about work, not looking at a laptop for three months, I feel like I came back fresh. What we do is quite intense, so I think it has probably done wonders to have a reset. I would say for sure it’s great on that front. And just having time to completely stop.

Carole: And what about your return? How’s was that?

Fin: Coming back was fine. Three months is long enough that you can completely forget about work. Most of the planning for the projects that started working on when I returned was done while I was away. Everything was pretty much the same as when I left.

Carole: Do you think being able to take a sabbatical affects your perception of 3Keel as an employer?

Fin: Yes. Giving people the opportunity to take three months off and then be enthusiastic about coming back to work, is good for retaining people. I think it also shows that 3Keel cares about having rounded people who have a diversity of experience. It recognises the value in getting out and doing something completely different. It doesn’t have to be work related, sustainability related, it’s just life experience.

Carole interviewed Fin for 3Keel’s 2025 Impact Report.