Getting a head start in HR

We have loads of events, meetings, talks and training, acting as a coordinator. I helped coordinate the EXCO Meeting in August (a monthly meeting for director grade or above), the 2018 1st Quarter Town Hall Meeting, an Intern Gathering, a Medical Plan talk, an MPF talk, an ICAC Probity Talk, Induction training and a company visit to Carnegie Mellon University. As coordinator, I was responsible for preparing the PowerPoint slides, room settings, sending invitations and keeping attendance.

The most hair-raising experience was the 2018 1st Quarter Town Hall Meeting. This featured a presentation by our District Vice-President, and the audience were all the staff in our five offices across the Far East area. The offices outside Hong Kong joined the meeting through video conference. My role as a coordinator was to make sure the meeting ran smoothly, a very difficult task because the internet connections in Bangladesh and India were very unstable. Even though I had had quite a number of trial calls with them, the two offices were still having trouble in the real meeting. I had put a lot of effort into network re-connection and kept them with us in a way that would not affect the DVP’s presentation. Luckily, after re-connecting twice, the conference call finally became stable.

I have learnt that ticking all the boxes is not enough. The most important things for an intern are to ask and to learn. Also, I have learnt how to ‘work’ in the workplace. When we are in school, our teachers and friends generally tolerate our mistakes. But the real world is a different story, especially in the HR field where we need to deal with confidential and sensitive documents frequently. The internship experience really gave me a head start in cultivating my HR professionalism, which will hopefully help me become a better HR officer when I graduate from school.