DayoneHR Tea Time Podcast Episode 3: Learning and Upskilling in HR [Transcript]

Below is a transcript from Episode 3 of our Podcast. It has been generated using automated transcription technology, so please forgive any mistakes, including grammatical errors. Of course, if you’d rather listen to our Podcast, you can find this episode on Apple, Google, Spotify and Amazon.

Lauren: Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 3 of DayoneHR Tea Time. We're so glad to have you back today. We're actually gonna be talking about learning and upskilling in HR. So if you've listened to the previous podcast, we've been talking about HR, HR tech, HR transformation, our journey, our experiences, some funny stories along the way.

We really wanna dive into in this episode more about you know, what we've learned, where we've learned it and how we're upskilling and, how everyone can upscale in the HR sector. I don't know Yogina if I can start, cuz I have been thinking about this story all night, because basically when I was thinking about learning and upscaling in HR, when I first came into HR, it was very stereotypical that you came in, you did a HR administrator assistant generalist role, and then, basically you were seen to go to the next step of the general so like the advisor and then the manager and so on. Well, I kind of didn't do that and I don't think a lot of people really understood why. And, basically I started out in a really small eCommerce startup, just basically anything, HR and payroll, just anything to help the business that was growing like a crazy pace.

And when I finished there, I actually went into a specialist role and I specialized in payroll and benefits. And everyone was just a bit like, why would you so early in your career go from a generalist junior role to like a payroll or benefits role? I secretly love payroll. Not a lot of people say that.

Yeah. But I, I secretly do. But the thing is, is that I learned so much in payroll and benefits and it literally set me up for life in terms of my career. Because payroll is always sort of the end of the monthly cycle. It's like the end of the employment cycle to an extent you really kind of see everything.

You understand, you know, what's going on with every employee you know, their time and attendance, their, you know, if they're getting bonuses for performance, like all of these things, you know, everything about that employee. And I remember being able to memorize. People's not just names, but like their employee numbers, their salaries, because I was looking at the data all day, day.

After that I went back into a generalist HR role, but I just wanna say that, you know, you don't always have to be in the HR generalist role. You can specialize any time and you will benefit from a learning perspective because anytime anyone asks me now, do you know much about payroll? I'm like, yeah, I know quite a lot about payroll actually, because that was where, you know, my early days I picked up so much knowledge.

Yeah. I just wanted to share that story because I feel like, you know, we're kind of told in terms of our career progression, oh, you need to do this before you can move on to this level and you need to do this. You need to do this. Well, actually everyone's journey is completely different. Do you know what I mean.. 

Yogina: Yeah. I do agree with that. My story is kind of similar where. My whole journey in HR has always been like Jack of all, you know, you do the onboarding, you do the interview, then you do the salary reviews. You send out the payroll information to finance. Whenever people need to talk to you, you are always there as a mentor, a guide and a friend.

And literally everything, as you mentioned in and out of HR was everything that I was doing. But when I do also look into my role as HR. Then, I can see that, you know, I was leading the technology part of HR for the company for pretty long. And it, it has always been like the unofficial system, HR system, owner role that I had, but it was never specified you know, even in terms of like training people on the new tools or training people on the processes, Literally, this was doing like everything, but you were not never given a specialized role.

And something that I've struggled with at times is like, you know, I'm doing each bits and pieces of HR, but how do I grow myself into something more bigger or better? Or what do I wanna do was always a question because was I specialized in anything? Um, my study was also like MBA, but it was not very focused with HR.

So no specialization in HR in there. My work was like all over the place within HR even being a part of the leadership team at the management team at the company. You know, when, when you wanna like have understood the ins and outs of HR and you wanna specialize, then what's the answer that there isn't one.

And then it's up on you to identify what you like doing the most, where do you wanna see yourself and, and do it just this, this kind of like feels a bit weird. At times when, because like your growth in HR depends on what you specialize into. Or, if you're a generalist, you will always be a generalist.

You could go to a manager level, but then there's just a limitation of like how much you could grow within HR. 

Lauren: And the funny thing is you kind of touched on there about when people ask, you know, how do I develop and grow my HR career. You know. And, people weigh up, you know, being a HR generalist versus a HR, ultimately.

My advice is always the same. It's get exposure to as much as you can. So that's not just within the HR field. You know, you wanna get exposure to different HR specialisms, but that's get exposure to different companies, you know, different size company. Different located companies, are they, global companies are local companies get exposure to different industries, you know, working within an oil and gas company compared to a tech startup.

It is very different. The culture is different. So, you know, I just say to people kind of work with different companies, you know, move around throughout your career.  You know, if you're at a big company right now, look at secondments. You know, I, I did that when, when I was at Amazon, I worked within the launch team for Amazon logistics. But after a year of that, I moved over to a European role setting up the EMEA HR shared service and that was completely different. And I got to meet so many different people. I got to learn more about local legislation on the continent, you know, and I just say to people.

Grab opportunities where you see them kind of talk to your manager, talk to your HR director, chief people officer, whoever it is and find out about what's coming down, the pipeline what's on the roadmap that you can kind of get involved in because the HR generalist piece is amazing. But, I mean, I'm a personal HR projects lover.

So if you, if your company's doing a HR project scene asked to be involved because you will, you will gain so much from it and it will show you which, which parts of HR you love and which parts of HR you can kind of, you know, take or leave. 

Yogina: Yeah, I agree. But I do also see a challenge in that, like, you know, most of the time, like specifically with my career, I started HR in a startup where you don't have as broad function of HR, like in a developed or like a very huge corporate company. So at that time, it's very difficult for people to identify like even what the different scopes of HR are and where they can go and land in at, at that time, like, it gets really, really difficult  to get that, you know, on the job on hand experience of okay I've been a generalist for long.

Can I go and find something else now? Or can I go and try talk to my manager and see, like, if I can move from a generalist role to performance management specilization or just become a business partner overall kind of a thing, you know, it's at times a bit difficult, but, thanks to the world of the internet, that there's a lot of tools and a lot of sites where we could learn, get membership and, you know, learn the basic theories of it and then start implementing it, work a bit by bit, you know, where you are not just even thinking about your own growth, but then you are also helping the company decide which path that they wanna take their HR team to, or, you know, help company understand what, what they wanna do and things as such. And also like people might say like with, you know, HR, it's just like, you deals with paper, you just talk to people that is it, but, but that's not all, there's a lot of, you know, different, uh, functions to it where you could specialize in a, in a particular field, like for simply, it could be like, uh, employee engagement specialist where you understand the psychology behind why people work how to make them motivated, or it could be a compensation specialist where you design, ways of like how a company compensates its employees or what, what kind of benefits that they give.

So I would say there's always an opportunity where you go into a company, you could look into like what you can learn, or if there's a way that you can deviate from what you were originally hired for and move on to a separate goal after you have done a year, year and a half. But then also there are lot of different learning tools that you can use to build your knowledge.

Just something that really reminded me when you were talking about, you know, looking for another roles and stuffs, like a lot of. People do talk about this is not related to our podcast, but just wanted to point out that, you know, if people switch their jobs a lot within a year or year and a half, there's always like, okay, this person is an opportunity seeker.

You know, they wouldn't given much kind of a thing. And I think that's a, it's a point where we need to challenge that concept and, you know, like show people that growth is important. and be acceptable of them want to want to move forward in their careers and support it that way. 

Lauren: Yeah. And it really feeds into the growth mindset, doesn't it? And I've been part of organizations where they have supported me in that development, you know, they have paid for me to do courses either in person courses or online courses. And I've been a part of organizations where they haven't, it's not been something that they've been able to do.

They're a small organization, so I've kind of set myself, my own goal in learning a particular area where I want to focus on and that doesn't stop. I think people think that, you know, once you've done so many years, you're like, oh yeah, I don't need to learn anymore. Like, I've learned all the stuff I'm supposed to learn.

Well, news flash, you are learning all the time. And even, you know, two weeks ago I saw a really good course online. It was a people analytics course, and I just thought, oh God, that looks so good. I'd love to have a refresher on people, analytics. And that's a course I actually have signed up to do over the autumn winter.

And, it's not, you know, about going out and saying, you know, I don't know anything about this. I need to learn this. When you get further on in your career, it's like, you know, you do know, I do know about people analytics and I've run, you know, HR metric dashboards, but everything is changing all the time.

Everything's improving and HR technology is part of that. If, you know, if people like me don't keep up, I can't give the right advice to my clients. And, to students to say, you know, this is what, this is what the latest trend is in, in people analytics and things like that. So, you know, to continuously learn and up skill is important.

No matter what point in your career,  you are, you are on, if you can't identify any gaps. I do recommend working with a, with a mentor or a coach. I mean, I work with a coach on the platform Better Up which is an excellent employee platform that people can talk to coaches for different things for health and wellbeing, mental fitness, but also business development, things like that.

And I think that that's, you know, amazing for identifying, you know, the root you may wanna go down in terms of your behavioral learning, but also is upskilling as well. So, I really wanna flag that because I think, you know, when I started out, it was kind of like, oh, you know, in the first five to 10 years, you need to learn all of this.

You need to be CIPD qualified. You need to be SHRM qualified. You need to do all these things. It was like tip box. And a part of that, you know, it is good to be, you know, chartered and things like that. But, but also if you've got gaps in your knowledge and you're interested, you can go out and learn through, you know, platforms.

That's the great thing about having cloud-based platforms, applications on your phone, everything it's just like you, you can learn something relatively quickly. Um, and, and for low cost. 

Yogina: Definitely. There's a lot of avenues that people could utilize. And it's also like something that people, I think, do not understand about HR is that it's a balance between being in HR is a balance between people management and data.

You brought up the point about doing people analytics. A lot of the time, people do not understand it and they'd be like, uh, if I'm good with people. That's all that I need in HR. That's a very good point that you're good with people. You understand you have your emotional intelligence quotient high, but then at the same time you need data so that whenever you're making any kind of decision, it's like an informed decision, rather than you just trying to work on a hunch or you just trying to work, work it out based on your gut.

So a good balance between like, you know, where you think about people, think about what good. What is good for them, but then at the same time also taking all of these data points into consideration, uh, you know, a lot of courses are there that can help you build an emotional quotient plus also help you be someone who could work on the data points, analyze it and get a result at the same time.

And also like when I personally do feel that when you are in HR, just learning about HR, isn't sufficient for you to be successful HR because when people come and talk to you about a guy from finance and comes and talks to you about, you know, our account is kind of messed up. You know, there's a lot of issues in there.

I might be nodding my head, but then if I do not understand what goes in and comes out of the finance department. I'm not actually actively listening because I'll not be able to understand what the problem is. So I do personally do feel that, you know, HR need to understand different aspect of business that may be sales, that may be a marketing. I'm not saying be an expert in everything, but have a basic understanding of what happens in that function and how that function works. What are the new things that's coming into these functions like in marketing what is the new trend that's going on, is there a new platform that people could use to enhance their marketing camp and things as so, so that, you know you being an HR, you're actually being a valued business partner to the company rather than just being someone who's doing the administrative task and stuff.

Not just looking at like HR kind, HR side of the business, also learning about all this other functions and new ventures is quite important for, in HR to be up to date about what's going on. What's the new trend is and how, uh, company and business can profit out of it. 

Lauren: I definitely think the business acronym piece is key.

If you want to get into. Business partnering roles, strategic roles and things like that. Um, but this really all depends about where you wanna take your career, because at the end of the day, it's your career. You don't need to follow this kind of linear path of working your way through the roles. You can do whatever you want.

And, the misunderstanding I found, and this is kind of a funny story. I was in a room with a CEO of a tech startup that was going through quite a big acquisition at the time. And I remember him saying to me he was talking about the development of the company and where he would the HR team to go.

And he kind of said to me in passing, you know, you'd make a, a great Chief People Officer one day kind of saying, you know, I'm not quite there yet. And that's where I should aspire to be. And I just turned around and went, actually, I don't wanna be a Chief People Officer and he just looked really shocked.

And I just said, I don't think it's the role for. I don't think I'm meant to be in that type of role. It's too generalist. And I wanna be in projects. I wanna specialize, I wanna, I wanna do transformation pieces that I can actually lead and, and be a program manager within that. And he sort of was just really taken aback.

And I think the expectation is that everyone wants to follow the same path, crawl to the seat at the table. And I've had seats at the table, I mean, it's great to a point, but it's just not for me. And, and having that reflective kind of moment for yourself to say, actually, that's not where I wanna be.

I think that's where, you know, everyone expects me to be, but actually I kind of get a lot more fun about, you know, doing this kind of work within. And, understanding that early on it is the best thing you can do. And that's where this exposure piece comes in. You know, doing courses, getting a mentor, looking out for, for secondments projects, talking to your manager, things like that you can do to understand where you want your journey to go.

Yogina: Yeah, I understand that. It's just not like not everyone who goes into the role of HR wants to become a Chief People Officer,  not all the engineers that, go into computer engineering always want to end up being engineering manager. They might just wanna stick with their technical career path.

So it's like understanding what different options are and what you wanna do is very important. Even if like you have chosen a career path for yourself, finding out that specialization is very important. And something that has helped me in my. Career is having these mentors who can explain to you about, okay, so what you're doing right now is this, but then there are these various options, right.

And you could learn about these options from this thing or you can ask me about it and, you know, just telling them that, you know, this is not the limited.  Thing in HR, there's a lot more of exposure that you can go and get and receive and getting that information, having these mentors help you understand and learn is learn and make a decision is something that I've really found very critical for my own career path.

And, you know, just someone who's not there just to answer your questions, but who questions you so that you get a clarity of what you wanna do? So the level of mentorship and coaching is just very crucially important, and that is the reason why even at DayoneHR, we have started DayoneHR coaching sessions where we give advice, or I wouldn't say advice.

Where we show people the different paths that people who want to do something in HR transformation or HR technology can take and just share our experience because it's all about learning and growing together of where we wanna go. If I just keep my knowledge with myself, it dies with me.

But then if I share it, there's my knowledge. That's going and building and helping people out. And, you know, it's just like going on with the life of the world. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And, with DayoneHR coaching, we'll leave the link in the description. Really this is about identifying, you know, how we can help you as an individual, but also how can we help you within, as in a business owner, someone working within an organization and trying to navigate your career, but also your objectives and your goals as well.

And I feel like, you know, it is reaching out for that help and support is really key in terms of getting to where you wanna be and getting there quickly. And I think that you'll then be able to see, you know, how to navigate out of some of the weeds. Sometimes when you're getting frustrated and you wanna get somewhere, but you're not getting.

And talking that through with someone else. I think that's key. And then the other thing to mention, you know, we've been talking about courses. We also have day one HR courses and we're launching a new course this week, which is our HR Tech Selection course. And next month we'll be, we'll be launching our HR Tech Implementation Project Management Course. So if those are areas you want to learn more about, then we'll leave that link in the description as well. But definitely encouraging people to go out and find the right course for them, the next learning avenue for them, because learning is just a continuous process.

And we all have to go through that no matter, you know, what level we are at within a business or what, whatever, you know, timeline we've been on in terms of our career. 

Yogina: Yeah, isn't it a beautiful thing where like we design courses based on what we specialize on. Similarly, there are a lot of other people and the companies who specialize on different aspects of HR and they do build this courses where people can just go and learn about it, or understand about these things and, you know, help them make a decision about where they want their careers to grow.

Go ahead, check out if you are interested in, even if you're not, you are not sure what you're interested in right now. You could have like some basic courses that you can take and understand what are the different platforms that available what are the different functions that available and how you can grow yourself into that.

Lauren: Yeah. And also to say, if you are quite early on in your career and you dunno anything about HR technology, and I know we've been talking a lot about HR technology in the last couple of podcasts, we do have the introduction to HR technology course which is a really good starting off point for those who really don't know a lot about HR tech.

It really can kind of set you upfor moving forward in your career as well. So, definitely check out that. But yeah, I think, you know, in terms of learning and upskilling and HR is changing all the time what HR was like in the nineties, what it was like before COVID hit, what it's gonna be like by 2030, I mean, there is so many articles online about how technology AI machine learning, all of these different things that are coming more and more mainstream are gonna change the dynamics of the department. We're gonna have, you know, they're saying by 2030, we'll have totally different titles within HR, the organizational structure of HR teams could be completely different. So just kind of keeping exposure to you know, reading online, reading blogs, we have a blog page reading other people's blogs or even on LinkedIn, some of the posts that people, the content people put on there is super interesting.

Just keeping yourself in the know is like a great place to start. If you don't have the capacity to, you know, start with a course right now. And that's something for maybe next year. But definitely keeping yourself in the loop, finding out what's going on in the market, talking to people, joining communities that will set you up for success.

Yogina: Yeah, definitely. There are like a lot of LinkedIn HR groups that you can join based on whether you just want to join a general HR group, or if you wanna join a specialized HR group on benefits or tech or employee engagement, there's always that available and a lot of different websites where you could learn about what's going in, HR, what's coming in and even learning the basics of HR and stuff as such.

So just it's about you initiating what you wanna do and how you wanna keep yourself growing. 

Lauren: Absolutely. And I think we'll have to leave it there. We could probably talk about this area for ages, because we have done so much as work this year on, you know, initiating DayoneHR Coaching and DayoneHR Courses that this has become a real kind of, you know, big initiative for us. So if you do wanna continue the conversation look up myself or Yogina on LinkedIn. We'll leave the link in the description as well, DM for a chat. We always love to talk. But besides that, I think we'll leave it there and we will catch up on the next one.

Yogina: Alright. Take care guys. 

Lauren: Thank you. Bye.

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