A career start in catering saw the young Jackson develop key skills

It doesn’t surprise me that Jackson began her career in catering, organising events. She is one of those people you know you want to be at a party with. Hospitality was her first love and armed with a postgraduate diploma in hospitality management, Jackson began an events role working for a private city catering firm. “I happened to mention to my boss about six months in that I had really enjoyed the HR part of the diploma and there and then he offered me a role as the HR Manager, reprinting all my business cards over that same weekend!” Jackson describes the move as a ‘baptism of fire.’

Over the next year she acquired new skills, organising casual workers and grappling with new regulations. It was 1998 and the Working Time regulations were being introduced. Jackson remembers a sense of ‘unease’ about it, particularly around holiday remuneration. “All of our workers were on zero hours contracts and weren’t in receipt of holiday pay. It was mind blowing for the industry,” she recalls. Not one to do things by halves, she took things a step further and undertook a master’s in personnel management to ensure she knew more around employment regulations. She did this while working for a different catering company, helping them to achieve an Investors in People award, and juggling both study and her own employment. Looking back, she captures that time as the ‘start’ of her HR career, yet she didn’t step directly into a people management role. Instead, she joined Business Link as a business adviser. It was 1999, the year the euro currency was introduced and the start of millennium celebrations worldwide.

“I spent five years there, helping small-medium and high growth businesses. They ended up changing their model for support because it was too resource intensive and that’s when I took the opportunity to take redundancy,” she explains. Armed with experience and a master’s qualification, Jackson embarked on her own business working with a range of businesses on a consultancy basis to deliver HR solutions. She was to do this for just over a decade.

It was now 2015 and personal trauma hit Jackson, when she separated from her husband. “It caused me to rethink things. I was self-employed and I wasn’t putting money aside into a pension. I wanted job security and while my business was doing well, I’d always had the safety net of a partner that had a full time job,” she says. The reality of working on her own and not having that all important office camaraderie was also hitting home.

‘We’re like the cobbler’s children in HR’ – we have left ourselves without any shoes

An advert came up for an HR role at the House of Commons. Jackson had a friend that worked there and began to quiz her about what it was really like to work in such a famous institution. She was by her own admission a little interview rusty, and she didn’t land that role, but a subsequent opportunity arose, and she started to work at the Commons initially on a six month contract. As with many of the best ‘temporary’ roles that morphed into ten years.

There are three HR Directors at the House of Commons, Jackson making up one of the trio. Her area of responsibility includes the HR shared services. “We’re currently implementing a new HR system so that’s keeping me busy because it’s a lot more involved than I ever imagined possible. I also have responsibility for the business partnering and advisory side of things as well as HR policy,” she explains.

Another key area of work for Jackson is a focus on the target operating model for HR. “We are looking to mirror the government functional model for HR. We’re focused on the structures that support that and we’ve restructured some of our teams with effect from 1 April of this year. That structural change delivers nothing in and of itself really, so it’s now about everything that supports that transformation – our ways of working, culture, processes and agreed standards.”

Key to this, adds Jackson, is mapping roles across the CIPD profession map, investing in professional development for the HR team and the service that’s being offered to the business. A second customer survey for the HR team has been rolled out with this in mind. “We didn’t expect any improvement from year one to year two because the whole of that year was involved with consulting and scoping out the target operating model. There’s been an awful lot of change involved, so now it’s about improving our employee experience, and we have a clear baseline to measure that against,” she says.

In terms of the CIPD jobs mapping, Jackson admits that “It’s a bit like the cobbler’s children – we have left ourselves for too long without any shoes and it will be great to pull that together and focus upon our own professional capability. We have a lot of talented professionals in the team, and this is about taking all of us to the next level professionally.”