Hi, first time posting here...I really need some advice please.
I've made the decision to leave but my question is this:
should I stay in a job where I can actually feel 'skill fade' daily and it's affecting my mental health?
Or should I resign and continue my job search with a gap in my CV?
(note this isn't about money)
For context:
I've been 4 months with a new company as a HR Business Partner role. I was with my previous company for more than 10 Years, and held a BP role for the last 3 years of that.
The reason I left was because I wanted a new challenge, not because I was unhappy. I believed my current role was part of the evolution of HR for this company from transactional to enabling. It has quickly become clear that while that's what has been said, it's not what they actually want. I'm a very well paid Advisor and Manager, but will not be given the resources (time, training) to achieve better results. I'm constantly firefighting.
This is not the job I applied for, and to be honest I think they've been dishonest in how they represented the role.
I have discussed my concerns with my manager and a trusted senior leader, both of whom accept the above. They also acknowledge they don't thing things will change and can't help me to influence the role HR has to become truly enabling.
advice appreciated, thankyou!
SME? Standalone HR? Called a "business partner" but actually a transactional HR manager? Possibly the first dedicated HR professional in the business?
Be careful, as they say, what you wish for. I have been in very similar shoes and felt the impact upon my own mental health, but... I also discovered opportunities within the processes that were more transformational than I had expected. Senior managers were positively hungry to off-load work onto me, which led to the "firefighting" experience you've found but also gave me extraordinary opportunities to take on and improve broken processes in recruitment, induction, training and employee relations. I had to adapt to a different tempo of work: some days I would be entirely occupied with the latest dumpster fire. Other days I would be drafting brand new policies and getting them nodded through by Board members too wrapped up in their own problems to get in the way of me fixing their company.
By the time I quit (and I won't lie: a large reason I quit was sheer emotional exhaustion) they had a new HRIS, proper payroll procedures, a mid-level of management coached and trained in employee relations, a shiny new employee handbook *and* a complete 3-year draft business and people strategy that I enjoyed dropping on the Directors the day I left. My successor still had plenty to do (I left many dangling threads of projects I'd never been able to find the leverage to complete) but the whole thing was the opposite of skill-drain in the end.
SME? Standalone HR? Called a "business partner" but actually a transactional HR manager? Possibly the first dedicated HR professional in the business?
Be careful, as they say, what you wish for. I have been in very similar shoes and felt the impact upon my own mental health, but... I also discovered opportunities within the processes that were more transformational than I had expected. Senior managers were positively hungry to off-load work onto me, which led to the "firefighting" experience you've found but also gave me extraordinary opportunities to take on and improve broken processes in recruitment, induction, training and employee relations. I had to adapt to a different tempo of work: some days I would be entirely occupied with the latest dumpster fire. Other days I would be drafting brand new policies and getting them nodded through by Board members too wrapped up in their own problems to get in the way of me fixing their company.
By the time I quit (and I won't lie: a large reason I quit was sheer emotional exhaustion) they had a new HRIS, proper payroll procedures, a mid-level of management coached and trained in employee relations, a shiny new employee handbook *and* a complete 3-year draft business and people strategy that I enjoyed dropping on the Directors the day I left. My successor still had plenty to do (I left many dangling threads of projects I'd never been able to find the leverage to complete) but the whole thing was the opposite of skill-drain in the end.
