3 Non-Obvious Ways to Advance Your HR CareerLet us take a look at 3 non-obvious ways to advance your HR career with William Taylor. (a VP at Workforce.com with 7 years of experience helping major companies develop better workforce management and HR practices)
Summary
Work in human resources on a small team at a small company. – More
Focus on strategy by automating administrative work. – More
Understand how HR impacts your company’s bottom line. – More
When it comes to most HR career advice, the conversation is often dominated by talks of SHRM vs. HRCI accreditation, postgraduate study opportunities, or job hopping to get ahead.
While these are all legitimate pathways to career growth, you’re probably already aware of them. They also lean further towards how to get a pay raise rather than how to become better at HR. So here are three ways you may not have thought about that can boost your HR expertise and advance your career.
1. Do HR at a smaller company
Running HR at a small company gives you the ability to take more ownership, see how every part of HR operates, and take part in more strategic initiatives.
This is often discouraged because many processes aren’t built out at smaller companies, but this is precisely why it’s a great opportunity. You get to be the one that builds out HR from the ground up.
What constitutes a small company is hard to define, but an excellent place to start is somewhere smaller than where you currently are. Other good rules of thumb are fewer than five people in the HR department or less than 1,000 total employees.
2. Give yourself time to work on strategic HR
Probably the biggest complaint about career advancement is that there isn’t time to work on strategic HR initiatives because HR is bogged down in busy work. This is a fair assessment. Some of the biggest culprits are collecting onboarding documentation, updating employee details, and fielding payroll queries.
Don’t accept this reactive approach to HR.
Get rid of the paper onboarding, let staff add their own availability and PTO, and allow them to access payroll details like their direct deposit information and electronic pay stubs.
By automating these processes, HR is no longer the middleman between front-line staff and an outdated HRIS. Instead, HR actually has time to pursue valuable strategic initiatives like employee retention and talent development.
3. Understand the commercials of your company
For most people, advancing their careers often involves promotions to more senior positions. While your technical HR skills help you on this journey, a firm understanding of how your company operates financially becomes probably the most essential tool in your toolbox as you develop seniority.
The most crucial part for HR is understanding budgets. Both overall and team budgets, as well as HR budget metrics, like labor spend, cost of employee turnover, etc. This will help you justify the value of HR initiatives and show their impact on the bottom line.
Secondly, you need to understand the business you’re in. Learn who your customers are, how your service or product solves their problems, and what role each team plays in that process. Doing so will help you make better decisions in HR, but it will also help to make other teams respect you.
Both of these are essential if you ever want to become a CHRO.
Next steps
You’re probably not going to be able to do everything listed. Moving to a smaller company is a big step, but eliminating busy work to free up time for strategic HR and understanding your company’s commercials are two steps you can begin immediately.
Schedule, engage, and pay your staff in one system with Workforce.com.
SOURCE Workforce
Sana Raises Additional $28M Led by NEA to Build the Universal AI Platform for the EnterpriseSana, a company focused on building a universal AI platform for the enterprise, has secured an additional $28 million in funding, with NEA (New Enterprise Associates) leading the investment round. This infusion of funding will undoubtedly help Sana advance its mission of creating an AI platform that caters specifically to the needs of businesses.
The Swedish-born Sana scaleup becomes one of Europe’s most highly-funded AI companies with $62M in total Series B funding
May 31,2023 Sana, the leading AI-powered learning and knowledge platform, announced today it’s landed another $28m in an opportunistic investment round led by NEA. Workday Ventures also joined the round. With a combined total of $62m in Series B funding, the Swedish-born scaleup is now one of the most highly-funded AI companies.
Sana's mission is to augment human intelligence through artificial intelligence. To that end, the company has built a category-defining product that blends the best of enterprise search, a learning management system, meeting tools, and a knowledge management system into one single platform.
Underpinning this suite of tools is Sana AI, the company's latest release. Sana AI is an omnipresent assistant that can do everything from search across all your company's apps and take actions in response to natural language commands to generating real-time summaries of live meetings and creating entire learning courses from scratch, and writing SQL to query your data. In other words, it's like ChatGPT for your company's knowledge.
By augmenting an organization's ability to capture, organize, and access knowledge at every step through AI, Sana enables any team to move faster and be more productive—from sales and customer support teams to product specialists and software engineers.
"At Sana, we believe every organization's mission depends on the collective intelligence of its employees. That intelligence depends on knowledge, yet most institutional knowledge today is scattered across multiple tools, trapped in people's minds, and lost in verbal conversations. AI is the key to solving this problem at scale. By unlocking knowledge for every employee across any organization, we unlock global progress," said Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana. "We're thrilled to have the support from NEA and strategic investors like Workday Ventures on this mission."
Sana wasn’t looking for funding when NEA made its proactive offer. The scaleup had a healthy runway having closed a $34m Series B round led by Menlo Ventures last December. One of the reasons for the additional investor interest is commercial performance: Sana has grown its business 3x year over year.
NEA will be represented on Sana's board by CEO Scott Sandell and Managing Director Philip Chopin. Since joining NEA in 1996, Sandell has played a critical role in many industry-transforming businesses, including Robinhood, Salesforce, Tableau Software, and Workday.
"Sana's past track record and current trajectory are exceptional. Thanks to top talent, bold vision, and rare organizational alignment, we believe they've already built a world-class learning and knowledge platform. But what excites us most is where Sana is going next: indexing every form of an organization's functional data through LLMs to become the de-facto AI platform for the enterprise. The use cases for this type of product are endless," said Scott Sandell, CEO at NEA.
In addition to Sana's commercial growth and ambitious team, NEA was impressed by the level of customer advocacy. The platform is used by an impressive client roster of market-leading companies like Merck, Kry/Livi, and Svea Solar—all of whom praise Sana's superior user experience and product velocity.
"Since day one, we've been amazed at Sana's pace of innovation and commitment to addressing customer feedback. The platform is more than a tool—it's become Svea Solar’s home for learning and knowledge. We see the latest iteration of Sana AI as a productivity game-changer, " said Hanna Manberg, CHRO at Svea Solar.
With the additional funding, Sana will continue expanding its product development and commercial teams across Stockholm, London, and New York offices. Sana's headquarters will remain in Stockholm, where founder and CEO Joel Hellermark founded the company aged 19, six years after teaching himself to code in C.
"Joel is an exceptional founder. This Series B extension is a testament to his technical and commercial prowess and visionary leadership. As we enter the new age of artificial intelligence, we believe the Sana team is well positioned to become one of the world's most successful and impactful AI companies," said Philip Chopin, Managing Director at NEA UK.
About Sana
Sana is an AI-powered learning platform that empowers organizations to find, share, and harness the knowledge they need to achieve their missions. Backed by some of the world's leading investors, operators, and founders, Sana has raised more than $85m to date. The company's headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in London and New York. For more information, head to www.sanalabs.com.
About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. Founded in 1977, NEA has over $25 billion in assets under management, as of March 31, 2023 and invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of investing includes more than 270 portfolio company IPOs and more than 450 mergers and acquisitions. For more information, please visit www.nea.com.
CHRO
CHRO
CHRO
扫一扫
添加客服
