How did you get into HR/ get your first role?

I began in the Armed Forces, where commissioned officers are expected to move flexibly between operations and personnel roles from one appointment to another. As I found G1 (personnel) partcularly to my taste, I arranged for an extended appointment in a management role and the MoD paid for me to do a postgraduate qualification in HR.

And then I left the Army...

I won't say no one was interested. I had a lot of interviews. But when push came to shove, no one was willing to take a risk on someone with no experience of managing personnel in a civil environment.

When I finally got a break, it was as a temp HR administrator for a local authority based less on my experience and more on the fact that they were desperate. I can't say the trajectory of my career has been a consistently upward one since then, but I have, at least, been able to stay within HR and move approximately upwards to the point that I'm now - ten years later - back in a management job.

I began in the Armed Forces, where commissioned officers are expected to move flexibly between operations and personnel roles from one appointment to another. As I found G1 (personnel) partcularly to my taste, I arranged for an extended appointment in a management role and the MoD paid for me to do a postgraduate qualification in HR.

And then I left the Army...

I won't say no one was interested. I had a lot of interviews. But when push came to shove, no one was willing to take a risk on someone with no experience of managing personnel in a civil environment.

When I finally got a break, it was as a temp HR administrator for a local authority based less on my experience and more on the fact that they were desperate. I can't say the trajectory of my career has been a consistently upward one since then, but I have, at least, been able to stay within HR and move approximately upwards to the point that I'm now - ten years later - back in a management job.