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Sarah Draper grew up on a farm in East Sussex and had only been to London a handful of times before she took her first job at Reuters in the millennium year, 2000, following the completion of her International Business with Spanish degree at the University of Hertfordshire.

A sliding doors moment in Barcelona

"It was the first time I could walk to a shop," she laughs. She'd had an insight into the excitement of living in the thick of it during a placement year on her degree. "I studied at the University of Valencia for six months. My friend's father then got us two jobs in Barcelona - one in finance and one in HR - and I said to her, 'you pick,' and that's how I ended up in HR!"

That sliding-doors moment was to set her career path for the rest of her life. It opened the door to Reuters, where she began a rotation of roles. "It was a great way to learn - at the time they were, and still are, fairly advanced in the market. I worked in the European financial services team, working across the UK and Geneva," she notes. After that it was time for a new challenge, and she moved to Canary Wharf.

"It was a bit of a trek for me, taking at least an hour and a half each way - I moved back to the City because of that and started a job with a law firm, Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, as their HR Manager." Ever positive, she adds, "That's the great thing about HR - you can work across a number of different industries, and that gives you commerciality."

Choosing businesses with a sense of community

There's a deliberacy in who she has chosen to work for. "Growing up in a farming community, I've chosen to work for businesses that have a community within them - I've never wanted to work somewhere that's just names on a spreadsheet, people I don't really know." She found that perfect environment within the law firm, but after two years it was time for something new. Law continued to be the calling for another two years at the Chicago-based firm Mayer Brown.

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A new industry, a steep learning curve

Then it was time for a completely new industry - Gerald Eve, a real estate firm. "I didn't even know what a surveyor was!" she laughs. An international property consultants based in the UK, Draper rose the ranks from Head of HR to HR Director. "I had time with the board, and that was a great experience for me. We started off as 300 people, and by the time I left there were close to 500, so it was a real period of growth."

In 2014 she was made HR Director. I ask her if that career trajectory was something she'd expected. "Growing up on a farm gives you an incredible work ethic. It doesn't matter what the weather is - when you have animals, you still have to go out there and feed them. It taught me that work happens no matter what," she says.