In the late January, SUSS had partnered with NTUC and organised a career networking session for the HRM students. After the networking session, we can also choose to pair with a HR practitioner of our choice for a mentorship of three months. During this session, we were given the opportunity to go roundtable to find out more about each HR functions from the invited HR practitioners.
Indeed, this session is useful for me. As the invited HR practitioners come from different fields and industry, their insights shared by them varied. Since my interests in HR lies with Training & Development as well as Employee Engagement, I have chats with the related practitioners. Certain interesting insights that I had gained from the session include:
i. To ensure the success delivery of a training programme, buy-in from stakeholders, especially the direct manager, is essential and necessary. Otherwise, no matter how well or beneficial the programme is, it wouldn’t be useful.
o Personally, I can relate this well. As with my previous working experiences, I can see how certain direct manager is not receptive to training programme as he/she deemed it as disruption to the employee’s work progress. To me, I find it quite upsetting as HR really invest a lot in planning a training programme. Of course, the training programme is of use to the employees. But, with lukewarm responses from the managers, it could hinder future training plans.
ii. Even though employee engagement encompasses various aspects, engagement activities are still the commonly used methods to drive employee engagement.
o Again, I can relate to this as I was doing employee engagement related stuffs during my work attachment. Also, this is the topic I had focused on for my applied project. Although the impacts from employee engagement activities should not be underestimated, I felt that supports from the managers also contribute to the engagement level. Aforementioned, if the managers are not receptive, naturally they won’t be able to motivate/support their employees to participate in the employee engagement activities.
iii. One can learn a lot when working in public sector, but will be able to demonstrate creativity and have more autonomy in private sector.
o This comes as a new insight for me as I’ve always thought that one would be able to learn more in private sector, since it appeared to be less rigid (e.g. in term of organisational hierarchy).
After the sharing session, I had decided to pair up with one of the HR practitioners for the mentorship programme. As she is doing Training & Development now, it aligns with my interest. Hopefully, I’d be able to gain more valuable insights about T&D from her.
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