Desk Lite

How did I get into human resources in the first place?

To answer this question, I have to go back to young and spritely me at university. I was studying medical science and on my way to living out my Crime Scene Investigation TV drama dreams. CSI: Miami was clearly a huge influence on my life. Insert Horatio taking off his glasses. YEAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Alas, I realised soon into my degree that science is a crazy detailed speciality that, honestly, is a whole other language to me. I can’t tell you how many nights I spent just staring at my notes, trying to make it all make sense. It just didn’t click for me, and my dreams of being my own real-life version of CSI were crumbling.

So, deciding that I must have a degree and not be a drop out, I transferred into a Business degree with a major in Human Resources. Looking back, I placed way too much weight into having a degree. Especially a Business degree. Education is great but not all roles require qualifications. Any who, Human Resources was chosen as my major because I figured every business needs HR and I like people. And HR, I believed, was about giving people a good experience at work. Work isn’t meant to be a prison.

And we’ll skip over the fact that the other options for majors were accounting and finance, which did not interest me. Not even a tiny bit.

Plus, I figured I could be like Hannah Montana and get the best of both worlds with my half medical science degree and the completed Human Resources degree, allowing me to work in a hospital.

So I did exactly that. I got my first human resources role working in the HR admin team for NSW Health. I got to work in some indirect way with the science and healthcare professionals. My unfinished science degree meant that I could vaguely engage with them in conversation. This is the role that kickstarted the better part of two decades of a career in human resources. My whole career wasn’t spent there, but it is where it began.

Human resources was a great career path. What I loved about HR was that there was a belief that the teams that I was a part of were making the workplace a better place. I loved the idea that we were making the office the place to be. I believed that my role was about enhancing the employee experience and getting people excited about showing up for work.

I loved that retention was preached and efforts were going towards making that happen. In addition, I also loved that HR is one of the few departments that gets to oversee the whole business. Lots of departments are siloed, but HR, to me, was never siloed. I could go into departments and learn from others who had totally different jobs from my own.

I still believe to this day that human resources is an important pillar in the business world. It very much holds a needed place, as it functions to provide consistency amongst employees, and that’s especially needed in huge companies with so many people. If everyone has their own version of employee admin, it can get quite chaotic and unfair. There would absolutely be employee revolts happening.

Somewhere along the way, though, I realised that I was somewhat delusional in my HR pursuits. Yes, HR was about the employee experience, but I realised that at some point there were a lot of practices that were outdated and no longer served a relevant purpose. Some were relics left over from another time, while others were so far removed from the employee experience that I questioned what the point was.

And so, I am wanting to question the norm of corporate life. There’s a lot I don’t understand, and I want to figure it out, with the goal of bringing it back to why I got into human resources in the first place: to give people joy in their work.

Join me for the ride.