Community Question: What did you do before HR? 🤔

Looking forward to hearing from some of our regulars!

​@andra.enache ​@Kim Stringer ​@HRJoy ​@HRHappiness ​@xtine08 ​@SalC 

I had a classic ‘wiggly’ career journey to HR!

I started my working life as a Graphic Designer, and then after about 8 years in little design agencies moved in to a Sales and Marketing role for a small property company.

I stayed with the property company for 15 years as it grew, moving in to a ‘General Manager’ role, with line management responsibilities, as we opened lots of new buildings. That was a lot of fun - I did all sorts of things; viewing new office spaces to buy, designing floorplans for the office layouts (serviced offices/coworking spaces), dealing with fitout and facilities management, recruiting all the teams for the centres, managing all of the Centre Managers, selling office spaces - it was a steep but useful learning curve!

I was nominated to be the HR Manager at the property company by an interim HR Manager (much to my horror...), discovered I actually loved it, got my CIPD Level 5 qualification during covid (lots of completely empty offices to write all my essays in), and then moved to my current HR role in March 2023. 

I’m now Head of HR in a ‘SaaS for clinical trials’ scale-up (their first HR role as a business), and in the last two years have set up the ‘people’ function, introduced employee benefits, new contracts, policies etc. I hired an HR Admin Manager in Sept 2023, and a Talent Acquisition Partner in April this year - so we are now an HR Team of three 😎

I have only ever worked in small companies, I think because I like to be able to see an immediate impact from what I’m doing. I can’t imagine being part of a huge HR team in a large corporate!

Being in HR wasn’t a childhood dream... but I like it now I’m here.

Now that right there...is a journey! 🤩

It’s always so surprising to me how varied the paths are for folks to get into HR. In your case, you’ve done this wide range of work and I have to imagine that someone saw it all and said, “she’s doing literally everything else, she’s gotta be able to handle HR as well!” 😂

Might be a silly question, but, looking forward, would being at a huge company (where your impact isn’t immediately obvious) push you away from HR and potentially onto something else? 

Tagging some other folks I’d love to hear from:

​@SabbuSchreiber ​@Nathan Jolly ​@rstambolieva ​@jwilliams79 ​@LegoMD ​@ruta.veite ​@JHBEM ​@Edda van der Ende ​@damayantichowdhury09 ​@Petr Kratky 

wow, it’s definitely been a long way for me too! 😄

I actually was in hospitality all my life, my parents have a restaurant, my uncle and aunt a hotel. Of course helping out a lot while growing up. In Switzerland we have the concept of apprenticeships and I did mine in a big 5* hotel in a popular ski destination. I was always good at admin, accounting and guest relations and that’s where my focus was. After that, I changed to a 5* hotel on lake Geneva before I went to work on a sailing passenger ship as a cruise director. Definitely had the best time there! 🤩

Coming back to Switzerland, I decided to do the Hotel Management School together with my sister (of course she went to the same line of work as well) and apart from having leadership experiences from before, I think that’s the first time I came in contact with HR in general.

After completing the school, I started again in a hotel as a Front Office Manager and got then also promoted to Hotel Manager. Unfortunately, even though it’s “not expected”, it’s still kinda expected to be available 24/7 as a Hotel Manager and as I wanted to focus on growing my own coaching business (Mindset & Perception), I couldn’t do both.

I wasn’t necessarily looking to change industry but it came as it came and I now work at a SaaS CIAM company as People & Operations Coordinator. Starting with just general HR Admin stuff but quickly came involved in more strategic projects as well. 😊

Wow! 

Thank you so much for sharing! One thing I’m curious about is your ambition to grow your coaching business. Has your time in HR made you reconsider this entirely? Or have you picked up some lessons or perspectives that you might eventually take to your coaching career?

Actually no ahah, it just reinforced my ambition to grow my coaching business. It’s really staggering how people today struggle so much and I’d love to make a difference. 

As for the lessons and perspectives, I’m sure there are many 😄 Definitely a few about how NOT to do management and how to do it differently 😉 but I also really love the mantra “Assume positive intent!”, meaning that whoever I’m interacting with didn’t get up this morning consciously making the choice to annoy people today or make life hard for others, they’re just in their own world and story and sometimes forget that we’re all just human. ☺️

​@SabbuSchreiber That is SUCH a great point. I consistently have to remind myself to assume positive intent. I also had some lovely chats with ​@andra.enache about the other thing you mentioned: learning NOT to manage people through past experiences. 😅

I am reading more and more about mindset these days because, like most people, I could always use more focus on this. I am among those foolish enough in the past to have thought little about mindset and its importance. Now, I’m all into learning how to change my own mindset and to use these positive changes to power myself through facets of life. It’s already helping in a massive way in my work life, excited to learn more!

Do you have any recommendations on books/ podcasts/ other resources on this topic?

Huff, there’s so many! 😉

I personally learned a lot from Bob Proctor and Peter Sage whereas from Peter I also got certified to guide people through his programs. :-) You’ll find a lot from both on YouTube, Peter has a few TedTalks that are really great! 

Also, I really love Rory Kilmartin’s work about Archetypes. He studied them in a completely new way and his work is transforming relationships so beautifully. 😍

I’ve recently become part of growing a community called The Sacred Space, a nurturing home for personal evolution. It offers daily live calls, soulful practices, and a conscious community to support each person’s journey in body, mind, and spirit, meeting them exactly where they are.

As for books, here some that I really loved:

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Magic of Surrender by Kute Blackson
• Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza
• At Your Command by Neville Goddard
• The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (there’s different versions for Singles, Married or Kids)
• The Complete Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch (I’m not religious at all but these books blew me away. God can be replaced by anything we believe in really but the questions that are answered are gold!)

There’s of course also quite a few podcasts I love like Lost and Found w/ Sabri Gazail and The Diary of a CEO but I’m more on Audible these days. So many books to still listen to. 🙃

As you can see, I could go on forever when it comes to this. 😉 Happy to chat more if you wish to!

This is AWESOME 🤩

Ok, so you’ve actually given me an idea here. I’ve discussed the idea of an HR/ working life book club with a few folks in the community - ​@HRJoy, ​@Kim Stringer , and ​@andra.enache for example - and there’s a few who’d actually quite like that (including me!)

Would you be interested in participating as well? 👀

   ​@Moe, yes of course, sounds like a great idea! 🤩

My journey into HR was a rather unexpected one. When I was studying my Masters in Journalism & Media Communication, I worked as a Part-time Content Writer and continued onto that path for a few months after completing my degree, whilst I looked for Full-time work.

Having graduated during Covid-19, it was difficult finding a job as a pioneering journalist since most jobs had transitioned into Hybrid or Remote modes. I then applied to a variety of roles where I could utilise any of my skillsets including content writing and finally received an offer from an IT company.

After initially working as a content writer, I was approached by the VP of HR, asking if I wanted to join their department and that is when I first stepped into the world of HR as a HR Generalist. I worked with the company’s internal audits, helped with payroll processing, onboarding, HR analytics etc. But it wasn’t until halfway through my 3 year tenure that I realised what I truly enjoy about the job is the daily interaction with people. 

Employee engagement, building relations, making sure that employees have the best experience and enjoy their work was the best part of my job and made me realise that People & Culture was my true calling. Soon after I started thinking about pursuing HR in depth and also explore the theoretical aspects of it so I can improve my skills and knowledge as a future HR professional.

So here I am, currently studying my Masters in HR Management with a CIPD Level 7 and excited for future opportunities to arrive! 

The ability to take a crisis point like the pandemic and find a way to transition to something else is really impressive, Damayanti. It feels appropriate to me that someone with your resilience and ability to bounce back is flourishing in a People & Culture context. 💪

The interactions with people and building relationships is something I can definitely relate to. This is something I absolutely love about working in community-building. In fact, I’ve found that this a great commonality with all of the HR pros I’ve met since starting my work here at Personio. 

I’m curious, has being engrossed in the academic side changed your perspective on this profession at all?

Changed my perspective? I wouldn’t exactly say changed. But it has certainly enhanced various aspects of it. For instance whilst I’m at my lectures studying a particular module, I am sometimes able to visualise the practical side of things having been through them at my workplace. This has occurred on multiple instances.

I am now more aware of how to implement certain practices, perform certain functions, and most importantly I am able to identify what flaws I have seen in the past and how they can be improved upon. I’d say the academic side of me is definitely equipping me to become a smarter and well-informed professional. 

Another zig zagging journey from me!

I spent a lot of the first part of my career journey in hospitality, from working as a barista to waiting tables in some beautiful hotels and restaurants. A little gap out working in outdoor education with children between the ages of 5 and 11...not for the faint hearted! What do they say, never work with children or animals 😂

I then ventured back into hospitality, but with a keen focus on event and wedding management. Firstly in my first senior management role managing a small country house hotel, which was a massive eye opener and due to the size of the team I guess, my first glimpse at how your attitude and approach to situations can really help someone else's work journey.

Fast forward a little bit and I did a couple of years at a boutique hotel in the south of Suffolk as their wedding and events coordinator before leaping into my 6 year stint in the co-working industry where I worked my way from a single site co-ordinator through to operations manager of the full 7 centres before having my beautiful little boy. 

The expectations on me as an ops manager and the juggle of being a new Mum spurred me on to look for my next step and it just so happened that my previous HR manager, who I’d worked closely with whilst in the co-working industry, was on the look out for growing the HR team where I currently am and felt that I was the perfect addition to our now three person team! … and here we are, very much loving the side-step into HR and pulling from my various experiences in different roles on a regular basis.

Hot take alert: I’d imagine working with children probably preps one quite well for working in HR 🙊😂

Also, hospitality work is gruelling, at least in my experience! Honestly, those years as a waiter and busboy were brutal...but attitude did mean a lot. It would actually make me happier to have a more positive attitude going into long shifts (which seems obvious now, but legitimately shocked me when I was 16 😂).

There’s a real pattern here of folks who came from all sorts of other industries and landed in HR. One interesting commonality: most people’s previous careers seem to have prepared them well for the daily keeping up of multiple spinning plates!

I remember being told by several of my loved ones that it’s always better to get some work experience before pursuing MA or MSc studies. It certainly turned out to be true for me as well, in much the same as the way you describe. That opportunity to put academic lectures and theory into practical context from your own experience is priceless!  

A fascinating question. Life-stories tell the story we shy away from. Mine is brief in that I never intended building a relationship with HR. I was a teacher, a counsellor, an HIV outreach worker and a manager of a rehabilitation centre for people recovering from brain injury, where a management training consultant witnessed my style of training and invited me on board. Suddenly, 25 years into my career, HR became a target audience. I share many of the personal qualities and skills of a typical HR professional and I fit comfortably into their tribe. 

It certainly is! It has definitely made my academic journey more interesting and dynamic.