Changing roles or careers is a mixed bag of emotions – and I speak from personal experience! Let me tell you a bit about how I transitioned from HR, to learning and development, to academia and ultimately self-employment – and what I learnt along the way.
What do I do with a BA in English...?
Like many graduates, when I left Uni I was quite clueless about what I wanted to do with my career. One thing was certain: I had bills to pay. Thus far, my experience was cleaning holiday-let narrowboats, supermarket cashier and typing for a freelance journalist who’d not yet figured out how to use a computer. This latter bit of experience somehow got me my first proper job as a temp receptionist, and soon I was working my way around the front desks of Greater Manchester, covering holidays. While it was a lot of fun (I once had to tell a Coronation Street star he couldn’t use our car park), I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do indefinitely.
In one place, I was covering a reception vacancy and was there for a while. The desk was very quiet – quiet enough to read the paper cover-to-cover each day (this was before social media and Wordle had really taken off. God knows what I would have spent my time on if I was in this situation today!). I asked, begged, nagged, for extra bits of work today. One day, I struck gold and was offered a stack of CVs to screen. And I was hooked.
What a rich insight into human nature: how they spend their working lives, what their hobbies are (axolotl-keeper being my most memorable), and what their aspirations were. Long story short, this was the start of my HR career.
Starting out in HR
I loved working in HR. I felt like I was constantly learning. I volunteered with the Manchester CIPD committee for years. I got my MA and was still keen to keep learning, so I pursued an MBA. I went to every continuing professional development thing going.
And then, I stopped loving it. Whilst I’d always been a generalist practitioner, I found myself in roles which were increasingly employee relations-heavy. I was constantly involved in disciplinaries, redundancies, dismissals. I was spending my life in difficult meetings, and when I wasn’t in meetings, my nose was buried in spreadsheets (which I’m pretty good at using, but they don’t half drain my energy).
Once again, I knew this wasn’t what I wanted to do indefinitely. But I didn’t do anything about it. I was too busy, and too tired.
Pivoting from HR to learning and development
My own redundancy led me to drastically reconsider what I wanted next. With nothing to lose, I put in an application for a fixed-term specialist role in learning and development, and I felt myself come back to life. I felt like I was regularly using skills that I was excited to use. I was coaching, mentoring, running workshops, and supporting people to achieve things that they didn’t realise they were capable of. I was, of course, out of my comfort zone too. I was no longer in the private sector, and expectations were wildly different. I had to learn the lingo, navigate the bureaucracy, and find my way around the hierarchy.
A couple of fixed-term contracts later, I found myself pondering next career steps. I was at a point where, if I ever wanted to be People Director, I’d need to refresh by core HR experience. And so I applied for a role with a broader remit, using all the skills I’d amassed along the way.
But the truth is, I was using skills that I didn’t love using (remember those spreadsheets!). And my love of learning had always underpinned my work – I like to think of myself as a research-informed practitioner. Plus, I’d always pondered what it would be like to do a doctorate and pursue a career in academia, supporting the next generation of HR and L&D folk…
Working in academia
When a role came up as a practitioner-researcher in a University, I felt like my dreams had come true. Working with a research team of brilliant academics, once again I was way out of my comfort zone, learning the lingo and – for the first time since my temp reception days – not working in a People team. I was no longer part of the heartbeat of the organisation. I was amongst the last to find out about organisational change. Instead of knowing almost everyone in the organisation, I now barely knew 10 people in an organisation of several thousand. I hadn’t realised how important this was to me, and how much of a change it would be.
The other thing I learnt was that writing academic papers about them, chasing participants for feedback, and getting my head into whacking great big spreadsheets did not fill me with joy! Perhaps, having read my story, you could have seen that coming, but I didn’t.
To be honest, I thought I’d had enough of working in People professions. I felt like I’d run my course, and it was time to do something completely different.
And so, when the contract was coming to an end, I decided to reflect carefully on my next steps. I had an amazing career coach who helped me to navigate this. Her first step was to really help me understand why I was ready to turn my back on a 15-year career and start over. She helped me to understand why I felt I should be doing certain things. When I realised that all I really wanted was to work directly with people. I wanted to keep coaching, keep developing people, keep supporting others through the pivot points in their career.
Stepping into self-employment
I decided that the most effective way for me to do this was to start my own business, which leads us to today. I’m privileged to work with some amazing clients. I’m able to work flexibly enough to accommodate a part-time course and spend quality time with my nieces and nephew. And as soon as I could possibly afford to, I invested in an accountant, so that I can spend more time doing the stuff I’m good at, rather than burying my head in spreadsheets and crying after calls with HMRC (true story).
It's not without its challenges. I’m learning to navigate the self-employment Goldilocks workload of always being too high or too low, but never “just right”. I’m never lonely (I talk for a living!), but there’s nothing like a strop around the block with a work colleague when you’re having a bad day. I’ve had to think carefully about how I plug these gaps.
Here’s a few things I’ve learnt along the way:
Just because you’re good at something, it doesn’t mean you have to use that skill if you don’t enjoy it
If you’re feeling rudderless or disengaged with your profession, really explore that before you throw in the towel. You might be in the wrong environment rather than the wrong profession
Few decisions are permanent. If you try something and you don’t like it, try something else. You’re not starting again, you’re starting from a place of experience
It can really help to speak to someone neutral (not someone with a vested interest in your household income, or someone who views you through rose-tinted glasses).
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