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Changing Fields

Hi All,

I am a senior leader in the UK office of a large MNC. I have approx. 20 years' experience in People Management and around 200 employees in the organisation I am responsible for. Day-to-day I deal with anything from grievances and oversight of performance management, financial impacts, engagement activities, recruitment and so on.

Over the last few years I started to deal with more and more elements of what could be termed "HR" and decided that I was leaning more toward wanting to move my career in that direction. I completed my level 5 CIPD and am pursuing my level 7.

Within my current role there isn't the option to just side-step into HR, as I already have a HRBP who works alongside me and we work very well together - she has helped me balance my approach from not just a purely financial and business perspective, but to include a people-centric element and understand the longer term returns this can give me.

I have reached out to our office in London for opportunities of furthering my experience - getting involved with ER casework or attending additional training and so on. This has been sparse so far, but the few things I've managed to secure have been very helpful.

I have recently enrolled on the mentoring scheme implemented by the CIPD and am awaiting a response from the individual I have reached out to.

The purpose of my post today is essentially to reach out - what else could or should I be doing to help my career move more in this direction? I am not unhappy in my role; but more and more exposure to this side of the fence has left me feeling a little unfulfilled and I know that I have so much more to give to the people profession overall.

Any and all advice is honestly so very much appreciated.

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  • To paraphrase Prof. David Ulrich, HR is not about HR, it is about adding value through people. Given you are in a senior position already then I suspect moving into HR is more about considering/balancing the human centric issues with the commercial aspects, which is something you are already doing.

    Maybe it would be useful to have a chat with your HRD or equivalent to discuss internal options.
  • In reply to Steven :

    Thanks Steven,

    I think a step away from the purely operational aspect is definitely more of a driving force.
    I've since caught up with my mentor and agreed some specific actions which should help to move things along - and I'm continuing to reach out to the wider ER corners of our organisation to see what else I can get involved with.

    As you say though, I already have the scope and interaction to be able to assess and balance the value I add through my current interactions - so I'll keep doing what I can do.
  • In reply to Philip :

    Projects can be a useful tool for broadening work/knowledge. For example, I love continuous improvement work, when talking to HR I speak about employee engagement and when talking to operations people I talk about quality and efficiency. Essentially they are just the different sides of the same coin.