Working in HR? If you could start again, would you?

I always wanted to work in HR and feel very lucky that I managed to get a 'Personnel Trainee' role in retail not long after I left High School without having to go to university first. My managers at that role were fantastic and really made me enjoy working in HR.

Looking back, I wish I hadn't been so demanding - I wanted to do everything right away, I needed experience first!

Having only worked in HR for a few years, I am really grateful that I can always look through these discussions and read some really good advice and read different opinions from people much more experienced than I am (especially now that I am standalone!).

Like many others, I just happened to drift into HR and liked it and stayed and got given more responsibility and joined CIPD and suppose did well and largely enjoyed it all.

So part of me emphatically says ‘ no regrets ‘ but part of me does speculate about what might have been.

With hindsight / knowing what I know now but didn’t all those years ago, I think I’d have done okay in academia or the law and perhaps had to endure far less work-related stress. My late mother always said I was far too sensitive to be happy as a ‘Personnel Manager’ and with hindsight again she was probably at least partially right - she was very clever and perceptive herself and rather well-placed to know about such things.

Having to be instrumental in changing - and very often (eg via the incessant redundancies) shattering the lives of so many colleagues never came easy to me and took its toll in all kinds of ways. But at the same time I suppose I enjoyed it and derived great satisfaction from getting pretty adept at damage-limitation in this regard. However, in reality / if truth be known I was probably happier as a solitary thinker, planner and problem-solver but seemed always to get caught in, swept along and buffeted by the turbuent currents of industrial and workplace change.

In danger maybe of killing the plant by pulling it out of the pot and trying to inspect its roots, so I’ll stop rambling now....

Like many others, I just happened to drift into HR and liked it and stayed and got given more responsibility and joined CIPD and suppose did well and largely enjoyed it all.

So part of me emphatically says ‘ no regrets ‘ but part of me does speculate about what might have been.

With hindsight / knowing what I know now but didn’t all those years ago, I think I’d have done okay in academia or the law and perhaps had to endure far less work-related stress. My late mother always said I was far too sensitive to be happy as a ‘Personnel Manager’ and with hindsight again she was probably at least partially right - she was very clever and perceptive herself and rather well-placed to know about such things.

Having to be instrumental in changing - and very often (eg via the incessant redundancies) shattering the lives of so many colleagues never came easy to me and took its toll in all kinds of ways. But at the same time I suppose I enjoyed it and derived great satisfaction from getting pretty adept at damage-limitation in this regard. However, in reality / if truth be known I was probably happier as a solitary thinker, planner and problem-solver but seemed always to get caught in, swept along and buffeted by the turbuent currents of industrial and workplace change.

In danger maybe of killing the plant by pulling it out of the pot and trying to inspect its roots, so I’ll stop rambling now....

20,000+ posts later... the rest is community history. Thank you, David.