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

Oo I missed this thread first time around.

At school I had no idea what career I wanted to do. I felt torn between 'something to do with computers' and my enjoyment of history, but after dropping Maths I found myself struggling to find a suitable IT-related degree which did not require A-Level Maths, so I opted for History at uni instead.

Quickly found out I hated my degree, but was too scared to drop out or change subjects, so stuck it out, diverting a lot of my effort and attention to my part-time jobs and finding a grad job at the end of it all.

I ended up taking a graduate job in a global consulting firm (Accenture) and expected to specialise in IT/business analysis, but found myself on my first client project doing HR, internal communications and L&D work.

Personal circumstances got in the way as I become seriously unwell and spent a couple of years in and out of hospital and off sick from work. During my return to work, I ended up working internally on HR/L&D projects and when I later returned to IT project management client-facing work I found I missed my HR experience and decided that's what I wanted to specialise in. I signed up for my HR master's degree and left consulting soon afterwards. A series of specialist roles followed and I'm now in a senior HR generalist role, in the Falkland Islands.

Would I do it all differently? I don't know. I suspect I would have chosen a different degree and likely ended up on a very different path, but I have no regrets about where I have ended up. I would have preferred not to have got sick, but I have a feeling the people elements of management would have become a key part of my consulting career regardless of whether that had happened or not. 

Funnily enough, before I was moving down here, I found an old careers report I'd received in Year 10 at school and right at the top of my suggested strengths and career paths was 'personnel management' along with 'management consultant'. I don't remember paying much attention at the time, had no idea what either of those roles meant in practice and I believe I thought I was destined for one of the other suggestions (teaching), but this report was obviously a lot more accurate than I'd realised, as I ended up in both 'personnel' and management consulting'. Teaching has also been a feature, with the amount of L&D work I've done, but I don't think I had anticipated it would be directed at adults.

Thanks for sharing your story, Lesley. I do love this thread... and this Community - which is the people after all, not the platform.

Welcome back from your holidays. The sudden flurry of notifications this morning warned me you were back! ;)

Welcome back from your holidays. The sudden flurry of notifications this morning warned me you were back! ;)