Blurb:Get started with a bang!Are you ready to kickstart your HR career?Your HR Ally is specifically written for those eager to prove their worth in the first few years of their HR career, or anyone looking to understand human resources practices. This book will provide you with a comprehensive insight into the important pillars of HR, starting from the very beginning of the employee life cycle—recruitment—to the cessation of employment and beyond. Addressing topics authors have traditionally avoided, such as corporate politics and internal tensions that can arise from being a HR practitioner, Your HR Ally will teach you how to become a proficient player in an organisation’s political arena and kickstart your HR career into success.
Build Your Personal Brand
Before you can start to build your personal brand, you need to conduct your own self-evaluation. You need to assess your career goals and what your aspirations are. If you are starting out in your career, then this is the perfect opportunity for you to understand what you would like to achieve in your first few years: What is your preferred industry? How would like to build your network?
By using the questions below to prompt your ideas, you can formulate these goals. I recommend writing these in a journal and dating each page as you progress. I personally use this method so that I can track how my thoughts, feelings and perspective on events and changes to my career evolve over time. Self-reflection is key to you building a good personal brand.
The first few questions are geared towards your degree of self-awareness:
• What current skills and experience do you have related to HR? Or what skills do you have that are transferable to HR? • What areas need improving?
• What can you do to address these areas?
• What would you like to do day-to-day in a job? • How much do you want to get paid?
• How much do you believe you can potentially be paid for this job considering your current skill set and level of experience?
• What are your main motivations for pursuing a career in human resources?
Try and answer these questions as honestly as possible, as it will allow you to understand what job opportunities you are best positioned for.
The next set of questions focus on what you want to achieve once you have gotten your foot in the door and are planning your career growth.
As an entry level HR professional, you will start from a zero baseline in terms of your personal brand. Most likely, your network of other HR professionals and general colleagues would be non-existent or quite small and it is up to you to start growing this network. As you are gaining the first few years of
experience, you should be actively thinking about how you can ensure you have ample opportunities in the future and how you will shine among all the other candidates out there in the market. This is where setting goals and having a personal brand comes into play.
Starting with career goals, you should again use your journal to note down what you would like to achieve in the next one to three years, and then in the long term:
• What are your family commitments at present? • What will they be in the next few years?
• What are your financial goals? Are you looking to become financially independent in the immediate or near future? • Will you instead concentrate on climbing the corporate ladder and establishing your career in the business world? • What salary are you looking to earn in the next five and ten
years of your career? What salary would you like to earn at the age that you retire?
These questions are to prompt you to think about what you would like to achieve and to start setting deadlines. Once you have all these in your journal, you have essentially built the foundation of an action plan for your career. From conducting an initial self-assessment and answering these questions, you may even realise that working for organisations or other people is not for you.
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