Naiman Labs Newsletter #22. My career story

This week has been a bit hard for me in terms of finding some new deep ideas to write about. So what I am going to do is to share with you several quite personal things about me. I saw all the creators do this, so why not 😉

My Professional Story ✍️

New Beginning

It’s 2013, and I am 20. Being inspired by my father's experience in multinational companies and my friends' kickstarting their career journeys in management consulting, I landed my first job as a marketing intern in a French multinational pharmaceutical company.

What did I take from there?

• I learned how business operations work, what brand management is, and most importantly, how to create presentations, analyze data, and work with business metrics.

• I had a strong imposter syndrome: how could a 20-year-old guy make presentations for the marketing director (especially without marketing education)?

Although I enjoyed my work in marketing, I wanted to work with more than one client to avoid getting bored with one industry, and I wanted to move into consulting. Also, I had a feeling that I might be good at working with people, so I was curious about the HR field. (Yeah, I thought that a very strong criterion in HR is “ability and desire to work with people,” but I was 21, okay? 🙈)

Recruitment

• I took a job as a recruitment consultant. That turned out to be quite an experience, even for a short period of time. That was basically something like a communication boot camp for me. ✅ Cold calling candidates all over the country. ✅ Meeting 20 people a week. ✅ Talking to clients.

What did I take from there?

• I learned about HR basics, communication skills, and gained experience dealing with high levels of stress from dealing with candidates and clients.

Consulting

Next step: HR management consulting. I worked on over 20 projects in six years, which taught me a great deal about HR practices and contributed significantly to my HR knowledge. I got a big portion of my knowledge and skills there. And to a large extent, working as a consultant formed not only my professional skillset but also my personality.

Client's Side

At a certain point, I felt the need to understand how HR works from the client's side. So I moved to corporate HR and worked in one of the largest retailers and, later, in one of the largest digital banks in the world.

Today, I work as a full-time business partner in an HR-tech startup.

I’ve never treated my work as just work. For some reason, working in HR became my hobby, so I constantly learn various HR topics.

My peak interest is human motivation - what drives people’s decision-making, what motivates them to do more and better, and what drives them to like what they’re doing and how we can manage this.

And basically, everything I learn and everything I work on is around this. Every day, I think of what I can do as a professional and what we can do as a company to drive people to their best. I think if you summed up the role of HR professionals in one sentence, it would be something like this.

Why am I telling you all of this?

First of all, I want to remind you that every work you do, every job you have is a source of new skills and new knowledge for you. So treat it like this. Don’t treat your job as “just a job,” even though a lot of experts seem to say the opposite today. If you find the work you do either useful for others or helpful for your growth (if it is both - it’s perfect, of course), that’s the right thing to do.

Second, do not be afraid to change jobs or even professions. Yeah, I know it can be very scary, but it is okay to change your job and seek something better for you. Nobody expects you to sit in the same place forever.

Third, I wanted to explain where my knowledge and advice are coming from to gain more of your trust, my dear readers 😎

Have a great week ahead!