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Career tales - Karen Davies, HR Director, Novus Leisure

This article appeared in The Grapevine, September 2009

Karen Davies, HR Director at Novus Leisure talks about her career tales

I got where I am today by being...flexible and taking risks! Throughout my career I have moved between HR disciplines rather than focusing on one aspect as well as volunteering to do jobs which were outside my workload, or not necessarily well-like jobs. I knew by not limiting myself to one specialism and by being flexible that in the long-term it would help my career progression.

I enjoy my job because...it is so varied. I easily get bored when I am doing the same thing every day and because my role is not that of a traditional HR director I find myself going from one extreme to another be it carrying out due diligence for a merger or running around a field for team building exercises!

The most challenging part of my job is...I don't really find any one thing particularly challenging, however even after 23 years working in HR new problems arise and so I take the opportunity to learn from the challenge and provide a resolution.

What is difficult is justifying spend for personal development and showing a return on investment. You can't pre-empt the impact, for example, that a training course will have on the business immediately so I've had to learn to use great influential skills in order to make the business believe in the investment in people before, and work with suppliers like learnpurple to ensure we measure the impact and show brilliant results after.

5 October 2009