Moving to a senior HR role

I have no answers, Kate but am very interested in what the collective wisdom of our colleagues throws up!

I have mostly but not exclusively been standalone in HRM roles and have not really had that much exposure to larger HR departments: on the few occasions when I worked as part of larger HR teams, I did not have the impression that the relevant HR leaders had more strategic responsibilities / roles than I was used to. As far as I could tell, they were mostly working on the reactive / risk avoidance / transactional / tactical level, only for larger organisations than I was used to. However, my experiences are probably not representative. Am looking forward to hearing whether I was simply unlucky not to come across a really strategic HR department with lots of interesting problems to solve or whether the type of departments I worked in are more common than we think?

Thanks for this Anka - I think you make a really insightful observation about whether or not HR in big organisations is really any more strategic than it is in SME's. I for one am far more interested in working as part of a truly strategic team than one which is simply doing more stuff for larger workforces. Those roles are probably fairly rare. Any other views gladly received.

Thanks for this Anka - I think you make a really insightful observation about whether or not HR in big organisations is really any more strategic than it is in SME's. I for one am far more interested in working as part of a truly strategic team than one which is simply doing more stuff for larger workforces. Those roles are probably fairly rare. Any other views gladly received.