Back to School

Posted by: Alison Chisnell on: July 15, 2011

• In: Community | Development | HR
• 20 Comments

Later this afternoon, I will be going in to my 5  year old daughter’s class at school and talking to them about my job. Eeeek! I did, of course, volunteer for this a few weeks ago, as a result of a letter that was sent home requesting parents talks, however now that the time has come, I feel more than a little nervous. Tweeting about this earlier prompted a fantastic response and Michael Carty has set up a theme on his blog about how you would describe HR to a class of schoolchildren.

So I am now as prepared as I am going to be and have decided to use lots of pictures to try and give a really short and simple overview of what my job and HR is about. 

Leaving aside the pictures of my journey (a train, tube and picture of my office no less!), the rest of my talk will run along the following lines –

• My job has a very strange name – HR or Human Resources. What it really means though is that my job is all about people.

• It’s my job to make sure that everyone gets paid their money for working. It’s very important as all of the grown-ups who work for us need money to pay for their house and food and look after their families. 

 

 

 

• It’s also my job to make sure we find people to work for us  and that we put them in the right jobs.  Everyone is good at different things, so it’s really important to make sure that someone’s job helps them to use all the things that they are best at doing.

• We want people to feel happy at work, so we do all we can to make it a nice place to be. Sometimes, if people feel sad then they come and talk to me and I try and find a solution to their problems.

• Sometimes even grown-ups do naughty things and it is often my job to tell them off. Usually I just have to explain why what they have done is not right, but sometimes if they have been really naughty they won’t be able to work with us any more.

 

 

 

• Just like your teaches teaches you new things every day, people at work learn new things too and HR helps them to learn new skills.

• Part of my job is also to answer lots of questions.  I’m quite good at doing that, so if you have any questions you’d like to ask me, please let me know.

 

So…..I will come back later to update you on whether there were any questions and if I managed to hold their attention for 10 minutes!!

 

How would you describe your job to a classroom full of 5 year olds and what have I missed about HR?

 

 

 

 

Tags: Back to school, Explaining HR to children, Explaining your job to children, Human resources