Do you work or have you worked in HR ?

[Mrsbadger77]

I'm considering a career change and HR has always appealed to me but I have no experience in the field so how would I go about retraining? Are there many jobs? What is the pay like and would I be considered too old ( mid 40s) to start in this type of career?

Finally, what does your 'typical' day look like? I've worked as a secondary school teacher for 12 or so years and I've been running my own business for the last three.
TIA

You obviously have a lot of transferable skills and life skills and you are presumably good with people. You need to consider that HR is basically an office job. You might be spending days in meetings discussing staffing or writing policies. Your skills would be best served by working in a training division running workshops. If you look at adverts for HR posts you will soon get a picture of what is involved. However you should also be aware that there are Masters degrees in HR and you will be up against those graduates for jobs. You will have to sell yourself on paper and in interviews. Do you use LinkedIn? Many posts are filled that way and employment agencies trawl it for suitable candidates for the jobs they have to fill. Good luck.

Thank you for that. I would be prepared for an office job and after what I'm used to it would be a welcome change , but I do really like the idea of running workshops. I'm totally open to doing a Masters I would just hope that there would be the prospect of a job at the end. I'll have a look at Linked'In

The problem I think you’d have op, is the salary. There are some great salaries to be had in hr but not for those starting out. It would take you a while potentially to get the salary of a teacher who was 12 years into their profession

I've worked in HR as an administrator, mainly updating timesheets and sorting out pay issues and handling all the emails and calls that come in from employees. It was quite draining as I got a lot of employees shouting down the phone at me.

I would've really liked to have progressed to HR Advisor, that would've been really interesting

And in terms of pay, I started on 18K, the team leaders in the office were on about 22/23K, the HR manager was on £50K and HR advisors around 24K

I work in HR - was at mid level then moved countries and had to essentially take a step down (but for more money !)

Day to day is internal recruiting and onboarding (offers, contracts, inductions etc) managing leave, managing internal issues (employee performance , grievances etc) policy writing / updating and basicly anything and everything else as smaller companies kind of dump all the randoms at HR but this keeps it every changing and abit more interesting.

Corporate HR is completely different, in a big company you’ll have one task usually and specialise in that, you won’t get broad exposure.

Do your CIPD rather than masters.

You will likely need to start as HR admin. Depending where you live I was on 25k before.

Don't forget there's a lot of technical knowledge required for a generalist role in HR. You would need a solid working knowledge of employment law and experience in case work. Most organisations will expect a CIPD Level 5 or 7 depending on the job.

Salary can vary a lot depending on the job. sector and size of the organisation. At Officer/Advisor level roughly £25 - £35k, £45 - 50k at Business Partner, more for Head of department or for senior roles in a large organisation.

Some sort of OD type of post sounds like it could suit you if you were relevantly qualified. What was your business? Is that relevant at all?

A head of HR is easily on six figures in a large business, but an HR administrator role is going to be not much more than minimum wage, or perhaps 20-25k in London, and the competition for those entry level roles is hot - they mostly go to graduates some of whom have degrees in HR.

At a minimum, unless you have an admin job at a company already and they are willing to start giving you some opportunities in basic HR administration, you would want to get a master's in human resources or take a CIPD diploma which would also involve significant work.

A FT job "running workshops" is either going to be quite repetitive and badly paid, or you will be up against professional executive facilitators with a lot of connections who have been doing it for decades. Most companies no longer employ FT in-house facilitators and use a mix of their experienced HR staff doing it part-time, and self-employed externals, often qualified occupational psychologists and executive coaches.

HR is a big field with generalist partner roles and specialists (employee relations, I&D, talent, reward). Using your teaching experience is possible, but you're likely to require investment in qualifications and working of your network to find someone to give you a break, or else competing with the (many) grads for one of the poorly paid entry level roles. It's a popular field.

Wow thank you. That is all so helpful and something to do a lot more research into. I'm not too worried about taking a pay cut, teaching was not exactly well paid. I'm going to investigate the CIPD route.

I'm an HR professional, to try and briefly answer your questions, yes there are lots of jobs (although it varies depending on where in the country you are, industry and specialism) - pay is good at the higher levels (although I wouldn't say very highly paid, not like IT, banking, law etc., but a good level of pay commensurate with professional qualifications), but as pp says it may take you a while to get there. This is a good guide to salaries, go to p152 for the HR bit.

The recognised professional qualification/accreditation for HR is via the CIPD and if you want to progress in HR you will likely need to get some qualifications, most people either study their way through the levels part-time whilst working or do a full time masters degree with CIPD accreditation. If you can cope with reduced pay for a while a preferable option is probably to try and find an entry level role (as an HR administrator, L&D Officer or similar) and study alongside that, as IMO graduates with the masters degree but no previous experience working in HR can then struggle to get a graduate level job, there are a lot of competition for those roles and employers prefer people with existing experience in the field as it were (you do have the advantage of solid work experience of course so you will have a bit of a head start there). If you are lucky you may find an employer prepared to sponsor you/part-fund your CIPD qualifications which would be ideal as the masters is quite pricey to self-fund... Have a look at the CIPD website which explains all the membership and study options.

Day to day, if you wanted to specialise in learning and organisational development (as opposed to being an HR generalist or one of the other specialisms like recruitment, employee relations, change management), in an entry level role you could probably expect a lot of admin, room/venue bookings, booking people onto courses, printing or managing materials for the courses/events, setting up and minuting meetings, inputting/extracting data from spreadsheets/databases and quite a bit of customer service e.g. answering phone calls and emails from staff and training providers. Most organisations also have some kind of e-learning portal/website these days so you would probably have some input into running/managing that as well.

As you progress you can become more involved in the actual design and delivery of the courses, set up and management of L&D schemes like leadership development programmes, apprenticeships, graduate schemes, corporate induction programmes etc. But on a day to day basis, unless you want to be a full time trainer/facilitator (which is fun but can have a bit of a ceiling on it in terms of career progression!), it's still quite a bit of admin and 'management work', emails, meetings, managing data and budgets (making the case to be given money to run the courses/schemes you want to mainly) etc.

Any more questions, do ask!

Just to say that some universities offer a Masters with CIPD.

@maxelly I'm so grateful for all that information. I'm feeling really enthusiastic about it and it sounds like the kind of work I would live to do and I'm sure I have lots of transferable skills that would really help me.

One if the reasons I quit teaching was stress and lack of a work / life balance. Would you say this would be a problem within the HR sector; I mean would you be taking work home with you on evenings and weekends as an HR manager? I always felt I was being scrutinised ( I was!) as a teacher, would it be similar? I guess each organisation would be different. Thanks again.

I’ve worked in HR for around 7 years and in that time have progressed from HR administrator to Head of HR. I’ve also completed a masters in HR Management (CIPD level 7 accredited) and have done shorter professional qualifications in project management and leadership; I think it would have been difficult, but not impossible, to progress this quickly to this level without the masters.

The salaries vary widely depending on the type of role and organisation that you work for but can be generous if you progress past advisor level (e.g. Business Partner salaries where I live are approx £40-£50k).

HR is very broad so you should consider whether you might want to be a generalist or specialise in a particular field. I enjoy the variety of a generalist role but it does mean you can be spread quite thin and can’t always get as stuck into a particular topic as you might want. I also prefer working for smaller organisations where HR roles tend to have a broad remit. More specialised roles tend to be found in large corporations so you should consider the type of organisation you would like to work for. Specialisms might include learning and development, employee relations, recruitment, reward management, employee engagement, equality and diversity, etc.

I also think that HR roles and departments tend to vary widely between organisations in terms of the way that they operate. At its worst, HR is a bureaucratic, administrative function that only supports managers and that is mainly drafted in for hiring and firing; at its best HR is fully integrated into a business and understands that it’s core purpose is to create a great culture in which people want to come to work and are enabled and motivated to perform at their best. I think HRs ability to do the latter is heavily dependent on the respect that the function is given by the senior leadership team, I would be very wary of working for an organisation that doesn’t value HR.

Re stress and work life balance, I would on the whole say it's fine, obviously to an extent it depends on your own circumstances and needs, plus your industry/company, as the HR department on the whole will take it's tone from how the rest of the organisation works, so if it's a high pressure, long hours, urgent deadlines type company you may find that spills over into HR too, whereas I've spent most of my working life in the public sector where things are in general a bit calmer. My junior staff pretty much stick to their contracted hours, and if they need to go over them for a particular reason (quite rare) I usually find a way to give the time back promptly, middle managers probably do on average a couple of extra hours above their contracted per week and senior managers maybe a bit more still than that (some of which is checking emails etc. at home in the evenings which no-one has to do but most do do). I sometimes spend a few hours at the weekend catching up on stuff but it's rarely absolutely essential that I do so IYSWIM, and my boss is great about allowing me an occasional few hours off in the week for personal appointments no questions asked, so it's a quid pro quo really.

I do I think it's true in general of HR as in any professional role, that if you can offer some flexibility to meet the needs of the job, e.g. staying on late to resolve a crisis or coming in early on the day of an event to make sure everything is set up properly, that makes a good impression and helps you progress quicker. The only thing I can add that perhaps is more applicable to HR specifically is that if you work for a multi-site or international company you can expect at least some travel as a non negotiable part of the job once you reach a reasonably senior level, as most companies can no longer afford on-site HR in every location (and if you are for instance the only OD specialist you will cover every company location), but a lot of people stuff really is best done face to face. Some people do find that difficult to manage with childcare etc. Some employers will be more flexible/humane with the terms of the travel than others e.g. how much notice you get and are overnights always expected, but if travel is an absolute no you may find yourself restricted to smaller and more local companies, or more junior roles.

Re stress, I suppose it's worth thinking about what it is you particularly find stressful, HR has it's own difficulties that may seem trivial to some but others do struggle with, particularly in some specialities like employee relations. You do tend to have a lot of responsibility over people's lives and careers which comes with it's own set of stresses (yes it's not life and death but at a basic level making sure people are paid on time and correctly is fairly crucial!), plus you do need to be fairly adept at managing conflict and dissatisfied 'customers'...