Career

7 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Earlier in My HR Career

Fourteen years in employee relations, a redundancy, a product launch, and a consultancy practice later - here are the seven things I'd go back and tell my earlier self. For every HR practitioner who has ever wondered.

27 May 20269 min

7 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Earlier in My HR Career

In 2025, I was made redundant.

I had fourteen years of experience, an MBA, and a deep specialisation in employee relations and industrial relations. I had spent years helping organisations navigate the most difficult moments in their employment relationships - dismissals, investigations, enterprise bargaining, restructures. I had sat across from employees in distress and managers in over their heads and found a way through.

And then I was on the other side of it.

That experience - uncomfortable as it was - turned out to be one of the most clarifying of my career. It forced me to look honestly at what I had built, what I had avoided building, and what I would do differently if I had the time back.

I do not have the time back. But I can tell you what I learned.

This is not a post about resilience. It is not about bouncing back or turning adversity into opportunity, though some of that happened. It is a practical account of the things I wish I had understood earlier - the career decisions, the professional positioning, the ways of working that would have made the path clearer and, honestly, more satisfying.

If you are an HR practitioner at any stage of your career, one or more of these will be directly relevant to where you are right now.

1. Specialisation is protection, not limitation.

Early in my career, I did what most HR practitioners do: I tried to be across everything. Recruitment, learning and development, remuneration, payroll, ER, IR, workforce planning. The logic was obvious - breadth means employability. The more boxes you can tick, the more doors are open.

What I did not understand was that breadth, past a certain point, becomes invisible. In a market where hiring managers are inundated with generalist HR profiles, the specialist is the one who gets called.

In a market where redundancies are rising - 268,000 Australians were retrenched in 2025, a national retrenchment rate of 1.9%, up from the record low of 1.3% in 2023 - the generalist HR professional is more exposed than the specialist. When organisations cut HR headcount, they cut the roles they can outsource or absorb. The ER specialist, the IR practitioner, the workplace investigations expert - these are roles they cannot easily replace with a generalist or a template.

I chose ER and IR early and stayed in it. That decision was the single best thing I did for the resilience of my career. I did not fully understand why until I was redundant and realised how quickly the phone started ringing.

What this means for you: Pick the HR domain where you have genuine curiosity and go deep. Not in opposition to breadth - deep roots and reasonable breadth is the right combination - but do not mistake being across everything for being valuable everywhere.

2. The law is not optional knowledge for ER practitioners.

I was not trained as a lawyer. I am not a lawyer. But fourteen years of ER practice taught me that an HR practitioner who does not understand the Fair Work Act with some depth is operating with a significant blind spot - and at some point, that blind spot will cost their organisation something.

The number of HR practitioners I have encountered who cannot articulate the reverse onus of proof in section 361 of the Fair Work Act, or who do not know the difference between what triggers the unfair dismissal jurisdiction and what triggers general protections, is genuinely concerning. These are not obscure provisions. They are the daily operating framework for anyone advising on termination decisions.

You do not need to be a lawyer to understand employment law. You need to understand it well enough to know when to call one - and to give them the right information when you do.

Vrushali Suvarna

The Fair Work Commission received 44,075 applications in FY2024–25 - 24% above the five-year average. General protections dismissal applications surged 57% in the first quarter of FY2025–26. These claims land in HR's lap before they land anywhere else. The practitioner who understands the framework is the one who can prevent them, respond to them, and advise the business with authority.

What this means for you: Read the Fair Work Act. Not all of it - start with Parts 3-1 and 3-2 (general protections and unfair dismissal). Read FWC decisions in your area of work. The Commission publishes them free on fwc.gov.au. You will learn more from twenty decisions than from most HR training courses.

3. Document your own career the way you document a case.

This is the one that stings the most when I reflect on it.

I spent fourteen years meticulously documenting other people's employment decisions - performance improvement plans, investigation reports, termination records, enterprise agreement negotiation notes. I understood the importance of contemporaneous records better than almost anyone.

My own career documentation was a disaster.

When I was made redundant and started updating my CV, I could not recall specifics that I knew I had been involved in. Projects I had led. Numbers I had driven. Outcomes I had achieved. They were in my memory as impressions - "I managed a lot of ER cases" - rather than as facts - "I managed 47 formal ER matters in 2023, including 12 workplace investigations and 3 enterprise bargaining negotiations."

The language of LinkedIn profiles, CV bullet points, and selection criteria is the language of specificity. Recruiters and hiring managers are looking for numbers, scope, and outcomes. Vague descriptions of responsibilities - "provided HR advice" - are almost useless compared to specific accounts of impact.

What this means for you: Keep a career log. A simple document, updated monthly, where you note specific projects, cases, outcomes, and numbers. When did you do it? What was the scope? What was the outcome? This takes ten minutes a month and pays for itself the first time you have to update your CV under pressure.

4. Your network is your most durable career asset - and it needs maintenance.

I am, by nature, more comfortable in a one-to-one conversation than in a room full of people I do not know. Networking events where everyone is overtly looking for something from everyone else are not my natural environment. For years, I rationalised this as a personality preference and let my external professional network atrophy.

When I was made redundant, I discovered how much it mattered.

The roles I was approached for did not come through job boards. They came through people who knew my work - former managers, colleagues, external practitioners I had crossed paths with on ER matters, employment lawyers I had engaged over the years. The network I had maintained, largely through genuine professional relationships rather than deliberate networking, was the thing that generated options.

84% of Australians in office-based roles now use AI at work, with one-third reporting savings of four or more hours per week - which means the transactional parts of HR work are increasingly automated. The relational parts - the trust built with a manager over a difficult investigation, the professional relationship with an employment lawyer who refers you clients, the peer who thinks of you when a role comes up - are not automatable. They are the competitive moat.

What this means for you: Identify ten people in your professional network who you have not spoken to in more than six months. Contact five of them this week. Not to ask for anything - to genuinely reconnect. The return on this investment is asymmetric and delayed. That is not a reason to skip it.

5. Being made redundant does not mean what you think it means.

I want to say this plainly because I think it needs to be said.

When I was made redundant, my first instinct was to interpret it as a verdict on my capability. The most qualified people are the last to go. If I was included in the restructure, something must be wrong with my performance, my relationships, my value.

This is wrong, and it is an extremely common cognitive error.

Understanding this intellectually did not immediately fix the emotional experience. But it did change how I moved. I stopped explaining the redundancy apologetically and started describing it accurately: a structural change in a specific organisation at a specific point in time, which freed me to do something I had been thinking about building for years.

What this means for you: If you have been made redundant, or if you are facing that possibility, the most important reframe is this - the decision was about the organisation's structure, not your capability. Your skills, relationships, and knowledge came with you. They are yours.

6. The skills you think are soft are the ones employers cannot find.

For most of my career, I undersold what I now recognise as my most valuable professional skills: the ability to hold a difficult conversation without escalating it; the capacity to be in a room with someone in genuine distress and remain calm and useful; the skill of translating complex legal and procedural requirements into language that a non-specialist manager can act on.

These felt like personality traits, not professional skills. They were not something I listed on a CV. They were not something I talked about in interviews. They were just what I did.

Senior Australian HR specialists who excel at designing comprehensive HR programs, leading significant change initiatives, and providing executive-level counsel on complex people matters - many holding advanced degrees and senior AHRI certifications - command premium rates in the market. But in my observation, what actually differentiates the premium practitioners is not the degree or the certification. It is the capacity to work in the high-stakes, high-emotion territory of employment relations with competence and composure.

These skills are learnable. They are also remarkably rare. And they are the skills that AI will not replace - because the value is not in the information, it is in the delivery.

What this means for you: Identify the skills you have that feel too obvious to mention and start articulating them explicitly. The capacity to conduct a procedurally fair investigation under time pressure while maintaining the trust of all parties is not obvious. It is rare and valuable. Learn to describe it as such.

7. The career you build between jobs matters as much as the jobs themselves.

This is the lesson that surprised me most.

In the eighteen months after my redundancy, I built HRWise.com.au, launched this blog, developed Flex HR as a consulting practice, and completed executive education. None of these activities appeared on a traditional career path. None of them were in my plan when I left my last role.

What I discovered was that the work I did between formal employment - the building, the writing, the thinking in public - changed how I was perceived in the market more than any additional line on a CV would have. The blog established authority. The tool demonstrated capability. The consulting practice built a client base.

Skills-based hiring is overtaking traditional qualifications, with 94% of organisations reporting that skills-based employees outperform degree-based hires. The evidence of what you can do - demonstrated through writing, building, advising, contributing - is increasingly more valuable than the credential that says you should be able to do it.

The HR profession is, I think, behind on this shift. We still largely evaluate each other through the lens of the organisations we have worked for and the qualifications we hold. But the practitioners building thought leadership, contributing to public discourse on Fair Work, and developing tools and frameworks that other practitioners use - these are the practitioners who are building something that does not show up in a redundancy.

What this means for you: Start building the career you want between the jobs, not just during them. Write one article about something you know better than almost anyone. Contribute one framework or tool to a professional conversation. Present at one event. The compounding effect of consistent public contribution to your professional community is significant and underestimated.

A final thought

I spent a long time measuring my career against a fairly narrow set of benchmarks - seniority, salary, the prestige of the organisations I worked for. Those benchmarks are not useless, but they are incomplete.

The more useful question, I have found, is: am I building capability that compounds? Is my knowledge today genuinely deeper and more applicable than it was two years ago? Am I contributing something to the profession, not just to the organisations that employ me?

The answer to those questions is the real career. Everything else is circumstance.

Key Takeaways

Specialise deliberately. Breadth is useful - but depth is what makes you difficult to replace and easy to refer.
Know the law. ER practitioners who cannot articulate the Fair Work framework are operating with a structural blind spot.
Document your own career with the same rigour you document a case. Specifics, numbers, outcomes - updated monthly.
Maintain your network before you need it. The relationships built in normal times are the ones that generate options in difficult ones.
Redundancy is structural, not personal. 91% of organisations making redundancies in 2025–26 were simultaneously recruiting elsewhere.
The skills that feel like personality traits are often your most valuable professional differentiators. Learn to articulate them explicitly.
Build the career between jobs, not just during them. Writing, building, contributing - these compound in ways that additional years of employment alone do not.

Sources

About the author

Vrushali Suvarna

HR/ER specialist, HRWise.com.au founder, Flex HR consultant

Vrushali writes about practical employee relations, AI-enabled HR triage, and flexible people support for growing Australian organisations.

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