My personal experiences with an unusual job title (for HR)
By Brian Kreissl
As I mentioned in a previous post, people frequently define themselves based on what they do for a living. It's hardly surprising then that job titles are extremely important to many of us.
Personally, I’ve been thinking lately about how my job title — managing editor — causes some confusion in terms of people’s perceptions of my main responsibilities, background, experience and future career aspirations.
Many people get the wrong idea about what I do, where I came from and where I’m going based on my title.
They wrongly assume I’m either a journalist or a career editor and I’m spending my time doing copyediting or managing a team of editors (as opposed to writers). And, as my job has evolved over the years, I’ve become much more of a manager and less of an editor.
Some people also don’t understand I’m an HR and business professional first and foremost — my title reflects only about five per cent of what I actually do. And all of the work I do to write, edit and create products, services, content and practical tools and templates is focused solely on the HR and employment law markets.
Yet, conversely, I’ve also met a couple of people who seemed to wonder just how someone like me as an HR practitioner with a background in law, business management and technology could end up in my role. I suppose the implication was I should have a background in journalism or English to do my job.
Enhancing my editing pedigree
Therefore, a couple of years ago, I decided to enroll in a part-time editing certificate at a local community college. My goal was to enhance my pedigree and learn more about my current role while having something to leverage in future as a possible fall-back option — especially given how talk of “portfolio careers” is all the rage these days.
While I learned quite a bit from the two editing courses I took, I just couldn’t help feeling editing wasn’t my real passion since I’m much more interested in writing (although I believe I'm actually a pretty good editor too). I also began to wonder if I was further typecasting myself in terms of my HR career by pursuing education that doesn’t match my long-term career goals.
Fortunately, two of my colleagues were kind enough to give me some advice. While both of them are journalists by profession, they told me I’m already a very good writer and likely wouldn’t gain much from taking any additional writing and editing courses. In the end, I decided to pursue a university certificate in organizational leadership instead, with the eventual goal of getting into an MBA or similar program.
‘Doing HR’ as opposed to writing about it
While I’m still very happy in my current job — and there are some major milestones I still want to accomplish before even thinking of moving onto my next role — my ultimate career goal is to someday move up and into an executive-level position in human resources.
I believe in many ways my current role has helped prepare me for such a career because, as I've said before, I feel more like I’m actually “doing HR” now than ever before, albeit in the context of a line management position that contributes to the bottom line.
Nevertheless, I am aware it will be challenging to make people see how my current job is actually an HR role. I believe my job is relevant because the service we have — Consult Carswell — is a practical tool that can be viewed as an extension of our customers’ HR departments.
Because of the practical nature of the writing we do and the content we create — which is downloaded and used directly by our subscribers (the vast majority of whom are HR practitioners) — I don’t believe my team and I are simply writing about HR. In many ways, we’re actually doing HR too.
For example, I just created two employment policies from scratch — one on job sharing and the other one on telecommuting. Yet my title must surely make people question the relevance of the work I do to a certain extent.
This all got me thinking about just how important people's job titles are to them and the impact their titles have on their career progression. This is a theme I’m going to explore further next week.
Brian Kreissl is the managing editor of Consult Carswell. He can be reached at [email protected]. For more information, visit www.consultcarswell.com.
