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HR Career Transitions: Choosing the Right Length Runway

One of the comments we hear often from HR practitioners in career transition is: ‘I’m looking to leave my organisation because there are no further career opportunities here.’ Usually the HR folks in these situations have joined a company hoping for a long-term HR career, but have later come to the realisation that in fact there is little opportunity to develop their career internally within the organisation.

The explosive demand for high-quality HR talent in Asia over recent years, brought on by massive business expansion in the region, has caused a ‘stretch’ on both the local and international HR talent base in the region. Until recently, there seemed to be more HR job opportunities on offer than talent to fill them. Good HR talent were fielding continuous headhunt calls and were being enticed across to new HR opportunities with bigger titles and larger packages. This ‘hot’ market has led to the average length of tenure in HR jobs in Asia falling to as low as two years, especially in China, Singapore and Hong Kong.

In order to protect your re‚sume‚ from becoming patchy with unnecessary job moves and in so doing risk your future marketability, we suggest that HR practitioners think more about joining an employer that offers the right length of ‘career runway’. As an aeroplane needs the right length runway for a safe trajectory, an HR practitioner assessing their options should look for career development opportunities ahead of them before joining a company for the longer term. A Boeing 747 needs a far longer runway to lift off from than a 20-seat commuter plane, and the same can be said for HR career heavyweights.

In understanding the length of career runway needed, you need to be self-aware of your current and future career ambitions. What do you want to get out of your position now and how does this fit in with your ultimate career goal? In order to help you to understand the length of your career runway, you might like to consider the following thoughts :

  1. If you desire HR job rotation through lateral or upward moves, or to gain exposure to different business units or HR specialisations, you will need to envisage a longer career runway in an organisation that is good at quickly transferring HR talent throughout the organisation. Your career runway will be shortened if you join an organisation that expects you to stay in the one job for a longer period of time.
  2. If you seek international HR career exposure, join an organisation that is strong on international mobility for its employees. Go a step further and look at organisations that are also good at repatriating talent and putting them into senior positions back in their home country once the assignment is done, as this will lengthen your career runway within the company.
  3. If you enjoy a regionally-focused HR role but don’t enjoy high travel for family reasons, look for an organisation that has an HR strategy that doesn’t involve the need to be in ‘the field’ too often. Factors that could evidence this could be highly automated HR processes, large country HR teams that handle the day-to-day country issues or a regional business leadership team that is centralised in your home location. Getting this travel equation right could help to lengthen your runway in the one organisation.
  4. If you are not financially motivated, but are much more motivated by the content and challenge of your HR job, don’t be seduced by an organisation that offers high pay packages​ at the detriment to well-defined HR career paths. You could find yourself underwhelmed in your job and your career runway with this organisation may be artificially shortened by your needing to make another career move.
  5. If you are motivated by working with an excellent Business Leader, as well as a very strong HR Leader, don’t settle for just one ingredient. The absence of a Business Leader who you can look up to and get along with could start to frustrate you quickly, no matter how strong your HR Leader or mentor. Your career runway will be lengthened only when you are in an environment where both your HR Leader and Business Leader are ‘right’, if these factors are important to you.

The concept of finding an organisation with adequate career runway for you implies careful thought on what is important now in your career and how this links with your future ambitions. Securing the right organisational setting that balances your short and long term needs can avoid many of the unnecessary HR career moves which are seen all too often in the market.

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