Welcome back to HR Coffee Time with me your host Fay Wallis. If we haven’t met before, I’m a career coach with a background in HR. And I’m also the founder of Bright Sky Career Coaching. And this is actually going to be a completely different episode to all the others that I’ve created so far. And I’ll quickly explain why. It’s because over the past few weeks, I’ve been having some zoom chats with HR coffee time listeners, who are going to be appearing as guests on the podcast over the next few months. They all work in HR, and they are all coming on to talk about their experiences and learnings on a whole range of different topics. I feel really excited about having them on the show, because it will be the first time I’ve done any interviews like this with actual listeners who are in the midst of their HR careers. And I think you’re going to love hearing and learning from them.

Fay Wallis: 00:00:59

But one thing that I hadn’t expected to happen while I was having all of these zoom chats was that so many of them wanted to know more about me. So they were asking me about my career story, how I came to set up bright sky, what the services are that we offer. And it made me realise I’m not very good at talking about these things normally, because as far as I’m concerned, my job is to be totally focused on you as my podcast listener. And of course, to be totally focused on my coaching clients. I’m all about helping others achieve what they want to, so that they can have successful and fulfilling careers, build their confidence and love the work that they do. It means that I’m probably not entirely comfortable talking about myself, I don’t really like it.

Fay Wallis: 00:01:47

And I realised the complete irony in this when I have coached many, many people to help them start speaking up more about their career stories and their achievements at work. But the fact that I found myself being asked to share more about myself and my work and bright skies services, made me realise that if all of these listeners are interested in it, then you may be interested in hearing about it all too. It’s also helped me realise that if I don’t tell you how I or bright sky career coaching can help you, you may never know. And that could be the perfect service to help you with your career challenge that you aren’t able to access because you don’t know that it exists.

Fay Wallis: 00:02:33

And it also feels like a good time to be talking to you about all this because I’m actually evolving, bright skies focus at the moment, because since I started making resources like the HR planner, and this HR coffee time podcast, to specifically help you as an HR and people professional. I’ve enjoyed my work more and more. It has just been wonderful to have feedback from you saying how much the resource is helping you. And it makes me feel like I’m really making a difference. So I’ve made the decision. It was a bit of a scary decision to let go of my outplacement services and to let go of coaching people from all different professions. Instead, bright sky career coaching and I are just going to focus purely on coaching and developing and supporting HR and people professionals.

Fay Wallis: 00:03:29

It feels a bit strange saying it out loud because it’s all such a new decision. And like I just said it was definitely a bit scary coming to that decision because I’ve spent years building up the business and building up our reputation for providing compassionate and experts outplacement and coaching services. It’s been such a privilege to work with hundreds and hundreds of people from all different professions with their career transitions or their career challenges. But I found that as soon as I started telling people about the fact that I would like to evolve bright sky in this way, the scariness has started to disappear. And instead, it’s starting to feel incredibly exciting to know that I can spend 100% of my time and 100% of bright skies efforts on supporting you.

Fay Wallis: 00:04:21

So if you’re listening to this episode, on or around the day, it’s released. The website and social media profiles won’t have been updated yet because this is all such a new decision. But hopefully it won’t be too long before they’re ready. So I’ll move on to the main part of the episode where I’ll share my career story and the different ways that bright sky career coaching will be able to help you have a successful and fulfilling career without working yourself into the ground.

Fay Wallis: 00:04:53

Apart from training hours and being a teacher very briefly at the beginning of my working life in my career with mainly spent in HR and recruitments, where I gained experience in small, medium and large organisations across sectors, including retail, executive search and engineering, I’ve worked in a standalone HR role, which I was in for quite a long time. And I’ve also worked as part of small and larger HR teams. In my last role, while I was studying for a master’s in HR, everyone on the course had to complete a research project that explored a real life business issue. If you’ve studied for a CIPD level qualification, you may have had to do this as well. So employee engagement was a really hot topic with the CIPD at the time.

Fay Wallis: 00:05:42

And as I’m sure you all know, there’s nearly always room for improvement with engagement scores. So I based my research project on digging into our engagement results to see what we could put in place to help raise them. I quickly discovered that there was this perceived lack of career development opportunities in the business. But I knew that wasn’t a true reflection of reality. There were loads of different ways that people could develop their careers. So I decided to do some training and career management practices. And then I designed and delivered a career development workshop. I was used to delivering training and workshops as part of my role. But this was normally mandated training.

Fay Wallis: 00:06:24

So it was things that managers had to attend, to learn how to do things like use our performance management and appraisal system or do goal setting with the people that they worked with. So I wasn’t expecting the response that I ended up getting to the career workshop, it was the first learning opportunity that we’d created during my time there that was completely oversubscribed, we had to run it several times instead of just once. And I had people queuing in the corridor hoping to have a place in case anyone had dropped out or not turned up on the day. The feedback was unbelievable. I had someone coming up to me in tears thanking me and saying that they had no idea just how much control they actually had over their career, and all of the things they could be doing to find it more fulfilling and enjoying their career again, at work.

Fay Wallis: 00:07:20

They were so excited about work again, for the first time in yours. I had emails telling me what a difference the workshop had made. And I started getting these requests to start providing coaching to people within the organisation. And the whole experience was just so rewarding, that after a few months of coaching the people that I’ve been asked to, I haven’t actually done any formal training at this point. So really, I was mentoring. I hadn’t realised what the difference between coaching and mentoring was. So if you’re not sure, either, you may want to hop back and listen to last week’s episode, which takes a look at that. But after that time, I suddenly found that I made a really instinctive decision. It was a quick decision to step aside from the career track that I was on for my HR path and retrain as a career coach. At that point,

Fay Wallis: 00:08:15

I set up bright sky career coaching, and I started working for myself from home. To begin with, I just coached private clients, people who normally found me through word of mouth, they would just ask for help with a career transition normally. So that was usually about helping them to get their next job by helping them with their CV, oh my gosh, I wrote so many CVS, that LinkedIn profile, their job search strategy, or doing interview coaching with them. The other thing that I helped a lot of people with was career change coaching. And actually, the career change coaching programme we have at bright sky is still one of the most popular offerings that we have for private clients.

Fay Wallis: 00:08:59

So when we’re booked by private clients for themselves, instead of being booked by organisations or companies to provide coaching, I found that my coaching clients were often people who just fallen out of love with their career, when it came to the career change coaching, they’d got really disillusioned with it, or they realised that they’d fallen into their career by accident, it had just sort of happened to them. Or sometimes they may even have been pushed into it by their parents, there’d been a lot of expectation on them, that they would go down one path, but now they wanted something else. But the problem was, they had no idea what that something else was.

Fay Wallis: 00:09:37

So that is what the career change programme helped them with. And we still have got that as a service. The only thing that we’re going to do with it to make it different is it’s just going to be available for you. So it’s therefore anyone who has an HR career, but it’s wondering whether, actually, they don’t want to work in HR anymore. But if that’s the case, what on earth do you do, and I’ll just reassure you now, if this is you, you can do countless things, there isn’t just one perfect job out there for you at all, there will be lots of different things that you would really enjoy and that are going to fulfil all the criteria that you’re looking for. So if you are really unhappy with your career, and you do want to change, please do have a think about that or just get in touch. And I’d be really happy to talk to you and give you some more detail about it.

Fay Wallis: 00:10:31

But coming back to the main part of the story, slowly the business started growing, and I started being asked to coach on other things as well. So not just getting a new role or making a career change. Instead, I found myself being booked by companies as well as by private clients. And they were asking me to coach people in their organisation who were up against a challenge and needed some support to get them through it. So I did my training as an executive coach so that I could expand my skill set and make sure that I was providing the best possible service. I coached people at all levels up to and including CEOs, CEOs, CFOs, senior lawyers, heads of departments, directors, but also people all other levels as well.

Fay Wallis: 00:11:20

Lots of people who had been newly promoted into management or leadership roles for the first time. The challenges that I helped with were different for each person. But they include things like having to manage a difficult person or deal with a difficult colleague, building up their confidence and their interest in their work again, if they’ve missed out on a promotion, overcoming impostor syndrome and feelings of lack of confidence after being promoted into a role. Getting more confident about speaking up in meetings or delivering presentations, delegating more effectively, and influencing more effectively to get buy in from the senior leadership team, or coping with an incredibly busy workload. I also started being booked for outplacement work.

Fay Wallis: 00:12:10

So when organisations had to make large numbers of people redundant, and you may already know that because I have talked about that outplacement services a few times on the podcast, as well as giving one to one support for people who were losing their jobs. I designed and delivered workshops so that I could support groups of people if lots of people were being made redundant at the same time.

Fay Wallis: 00:12:34

And I also created two online courses. So I have a CV writing course. And I also have something that ended up proving incredibly popular LinkedIn course, which is all about how to create a fantastic LinkedIn profile, and start using LinkedIn really effectively for your job search. But it got to the point where the business, bright sky, it couldn’t just be me anymore, I was getting too busy.

Fay Wallis: 00:13:01

And I didn’t want the quality of the work to suffer. So I started building a team based on the values that are at the heart of all of my and all of bright sky career coaching work. And those values are firstly, empathy. So I know that a lot of the time when someone comes to us, it’s because they’re having a tough time. It’s so important that we’re compassionate, that we’re understanding and that we’re supportive. When we’re working with our clients, I want anyone who comes to us to know that we will create a safe space for them. And they can express any emotions that they need to whether that means crying, or feeling cross or just wanting to talk things through and feeling very calm. No matter how you’re feeling, we’re here to help.

Fay Wallis: 00:13:30

So we’re just going to be working with HR professionals, I have had to tell a couple of people I’ve been working with that actually have not going to need their services anymore because they haven’t got the relevant background. They’re not coming from an HR background. And as well as coming from a relevant background. Everyone who is on the bright sky team is really well qualified. So like I have, they may have a master’s in HR or an HR qualification and they will also be trained to a very high level in coaching skills are third value is empowerment. Our mission is to ensure that our clients are equipped with the confidence that energy and the skills to launch the sails forward and achieve success in their careers.

Fay Wallis: 00:13:30

I really want you if you work with me or you work with any of the other coaches to feel uplifted, feel energised, feel empowered, and know that you can go after your career goals you can have the career that you want. Other things that happened that led to bright sky being where I sit today was that from talking to the HR and people teams who were booking us for coaching or outplacement, I could see how incredibly busy they were and how much pressure they often felt under, I’d been creating free resources for a while to help my coaching clients.

Fay Wallis: 00:13:51

The second value is expertise. I quickly realised after becoming a career coach that anyone can call themselves a coach is a completely unregulated industry. So it was important to me that everyone on our team is fully qualified with a really relevant background for the work that we do. So for example, where I’ve decided to change the focus of the business slightly.

Fay Wallis: 00:15:37

Anyway, I had this blog that I updated sporadically with articles and things like how to do well in an interview or how to write a good CV or negotiate a pay rise. But I decided to start creating resources specifically to help HR and people professionals. So it started off with a few blogs, which then turned into a monthly newsletter, which eventually went on to become the weekly HR coffee time email that I send out every week today. And I also ended up creating the HR planner, I put it together over the Christmas holidays because the Christmas holidays tend to be quite a quiet time. As far as coaching is concerned. It’s a free calendar for HR and people professionals to use to help you to plan for a successful year.

Fay Wallis: 00:16:23well as the free version for: 2022Fay Wallis: 00:17:22

But coming back again, after releasing the first HR planner, I started being approached by HR professionals for coaching for themselves. And I found probably unsurprisingly that I really enjoyed working with them, I think partly because my values tend to be quite strongly aligned with theirs. And also because I could genuinely understand their challenges. Although I don’t technically work in HR anymore. It’s still an area that I’m passionate about and think is just so important for organisations, I love being immersed back into that world again. And it was incredibly rewarding. Seeing my HR coaching clients growing confidence and credibility and in their happiness levels at work.

Fay Wallis: 00:18:06

The next thing that I moved on to was this podcast. As someone who loves podcasts, I’ve been toying with the idea of having one for years. And as I found myself typing more and more back into the world of HR, I decided to create this podcast that you’re listening to right now. HR coffee time, I wanted it to be a resource I wish I’d had in my HR career, one that I knew would be helpful for my coaching clients who had HR careers. I couldn’t see any other podcasts that was specifically focused on helping HR and people professionals develop their HR careers, hit their career goals, and overcome any challenges that they came across along the way.

Fay Wallis: 00:18:48

Now that I’m more than a year into having the podcast, it does feel like a lot of work. I spend at least a day a week on each episode, but it feels so worth it. Because of all the messages I receive, saying how it’s helped. I’ve actually cried. Although that’s not saying much. I’m definitely a crier, I have cried reading some of the messages that I’ve had. And I’ve got them all saved, ready to look at whenever I question why on earth, I’m spending all of this time on the podcast.

Fay Wallis: 00:19:19

The latest thing that I’ve created specifically for HR and people professionals, is my group programme, which is called inspiring HR. I’d spotted that there was some common themes cropping up amongst my coaching clients who worked in HR, a feeling that they weren’t valued in the same way as other members of the senior team. Feelings of getting frustrated when their ideas which they knew were brilliant and they knew would make a real difference to the organisation. When those ideas were shut down, or they weren’t bought into by everyone else who needed to buy into them. And they’d often find that their confidence was just being chipped away at which often left them wondering whether they were even in the right role.

Fay Wallis: 00:20:03

So I created the group programme to help. I thought that, although obviously I can help everyone on a one on one basis, what I liked about the idea of having a group programme was the idea that everyone in the group would be able to support each other. As well as having support from me, I remember how lonely it can feel, when you’re in your HR career, whether you’re in a standalone role, or you’re working in a team, but you don’t necessarily feel you have got people that you can talk to about how you feel and what your challenges are, or who you can just bounce ideas off of or ask for a sanity check on certain things, I realised that having a group could be quite powerful.

Fay Wallis: 00:20:44of October. So that’s October: 2022Fay Wallis: 00:21:26

So I’ve already touched on the career change programme and told you a little bit about that. I’ve just talked to you through the inspiring HR group programme, just to let you know the other ways that we can help you with your career. There’s also one to one coaching available. So I talked through some of the challenges that I’ve helped previous clients with, before we can help you with all of those challenges for yourself, whatever it is that stopping you from having the career or the happiness at work that you want, we can help you work on that and get to where you really want to be.

Fay Wallis: 00:21:59

The other thing to mention is interview coaching. So that is a great way of getting you ready and confident for an interview, we can focus on whatever it is that you’re most worried about when it comes to interviews. But as an example of some of the things that we typically focus on, they can be things like getting you really, really good at answering questions using the STAR technique. And if you’re thinking, oh, what’s the style technique, if you hop back to Episode 50 of the podcast, which is called how to impress in a competency based interview and get your ideal job. I talk about it that in a lot of detail.

Fay Wallis: 00:22:39

Other questions we can help you prepare for include the dreaded, tell me about yourself question or talk me through your CV. I know they’re questions that lots of people hate answering or tell me about your strengths. So tell me about your weaknesses. Whatever questions that is you’re worried about, don’t worry, we can help you get ready for them. And we’ve also had interview coaching clients ask if they can practice a presentation that they’ve been asked to deliver as part of the interview process.