My Take-Your-Kid-to-Work-Day was in the comfort of my own home. No, seriously, since my mom’s job is stationed in China and she moved here, she works from home conducting meetings with her colleagues. She works as a Human Resources Manager in the Strategic HR ‘section’ and they specialize in Training, performance evaluation, recruitment, etc. HR departments in other areas of work manage the employee life cycle, finding new recruits, hiring, and firing employees to manage workers.
In strategic HR, she works to be a business partner and works to maintain good relationships between a company and its employees. Strategic HR also makes offer letters and extends offers to APAC (Asia Pacific, as the business is stationed in China) employees, and they program all kinds of HR activities to enhance the company’s goals. When she still resided in China, as a manager, she also traveled to different APAC offices to solve problems, such as the Singapore, Shanghai, and Atlanta branches.
This job requires a high level of problem-solving skills as well as social skills to be successful, as well as a knowledge of certain computer programs and good organizational skills. Business administration is difficult, and HR managers must be good at this. This includes accounting and finance of funds of a company managing a high number of employees.
The benefits of working from home for a job like this is that with the coming of technology, she can easily connect to the company intranet via VPN to hold conference calls, business meetings and discussions. It’s also infinitely less nerve-wracking when you’re in the comfort of your own home when you do business meetings. Of course, it’s probably easier to collaborate with colleagues and other branches when you’re in the business building itself, and this is one of the drawbacks from working at home. Being cooped up at home sitting at your computer doesn’t do much for the state of your health either.
Overall, I learnt a lot on Take-Your-Kid-To-Work-Day and I’m glad I got to learn a little bit about my mom’s job.