My HR Journey

New Session- new classes!

Monday, March 3, 2014

Well- I start a new class today- one step closer to my degree in HR Management. 

I have been told, "You are TOO nice to be an HR Manager." Really? Ok- so I'm a little sensitive. Just a tad. However, since beginning my HR journey- my confidence has increased. BIG TIME. It started with when I was training for my first half marathon back in 2011. The day after I participated in the half marathon, I lost my job. Sucky, but true. I had been wanting to go back to school for some time, but had hit road blocks, so my wonderful boyfriend, Nic, suggested that since I wasn't working, I now had time to go back to school. Why not? So, I began in May of 2011. The story how I got into HR is in the previous post. 

Has it been easy? Oh heck no! In fact, since starting school- I endured 3 surgeries in a 14 month period. The last one was in April of 2013 while training for a half marathon (the other two were 4 months apart, back in February and June of 2012- which threw me out of doing the half marathon in April of 2012). This has caused a major distraction in my school and my professional life (that's another post). 

My goal would be to work for a not-so-large company....maybe 200 employees, to start out with. But, today I'll start out with working on classes to the best of my ability. 

Another thing I'm working on is getting involved with SHRM and my local chapter, PHRMA. This will give me a chance to get involved in the HR world and gain some contacts and also possibly some mentors. 

Onward,

Carlen

What is this "HR Journey"?

Thursday, January 30th, 2014

You may be wondering, "what's the deal with this HR Journey, anyway?" Wellllllll...

It started back in January of 2012. I was attending DeVry University  when I began a work-study position (back in December of 2011) in Career Services. At the time, I was pursuing my Bachelor's Degree in Web and Gaming Design (this started from a love of making websites of my family from various generic web page makers- back in early 2000). I really liked my job, helping the students, and learning what it takes to make a resume "pop" for a particular job. My (now former) supervisor asked me if I liked my job, and I said I did (I'm a people person and dealt with students and staff there at the school). She suggested that since I liked my job and everything...did I consider a career in Human Resources? Hmmm....good question!

This got me to thinking. I started researching more and more about Human Resources. I also remembered that most people in HR were "scary"! I did some research on HR and learned that there were a lot of different laws you had to study, and I was OK with that. I kept thinking about, over and over, my love for working with people and the thing that intrigued me most was- "Can I 'change' the face of HR? Can I bring a human side to it?" So, in February of 2012, taking a huge leap of faith that I would be pursuing this career with everything that I had, no holds barred- I changed my degree from Web and Gaming Design, to a Bachelor's Degree in Technical Management with a focus on Human Resources Management. Thus began my HR Journey. I was also able to join some awesome communities in Google that were Human Resources-related. I connected with a great mentor who has graciously dealt with my many questions and has given me some great advice! You can see his blog here (and he's a HUGE Dr. Who fan!).

Questions for today:

1. What is YOUR "journey"? Are you on the path that you saw yourself on 5, 10, even 15 years ago?

2. Are you currently enrolled in school? If not, have you considered going back? Why or why not?

3. What is a journey you would like to be on? It can be real or imagined. ;)