I am constantly in awe of how things work out…

Many people don’t know this but for the first seventeen years of my life, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I was always someone who made my sister play school growing up (sorry Grace). I am super organized and have no problem leading a crowd. It wasn’t until my last year of high school that I decided I wanted to study business. I didn’t know exactly what area, so I started off college as a general business major. After discovering that I was interested in International Business, the requirement of this major was to declare a second major, a language minor, and study abroad. I added on Human Resources Management and Spanish, and studied abroad in Barcelona in the summer of 2017.

The final summer before graduating college, I had an HR internship with Hubbell Lighting. That was my first experience in the manufacturing industry, where I worked in an office that was 50% salaried workers and 50% hourly employees working in the warehouse.

This internship is where I first developed my passion for the hourly workforce. At Hubbell, I was managed by Amber Carter, who is still a good friend and mentor today. Amber treated me like a regular, fulltime employee. I worked directly with Directors, Vice Presidents, and business leaders to support over 200 employees.

While in my senior year of college, Amber joined Komatsu and always shared how great of an organization it was. After graduating college, I went to Thailand for a couple of weeks because I wanted to travel before beginning to work full-time. Thailand is still the best place I have ever been. Check out the picture below of me at an elephant sanctuary.

I was originally looking for an HR generalist position, with the long-term goal of being an HR Manager. The only entry-level position in HR available at Komatsu at the time was a Compensation and Benefits Analyst. I reflected on my past experiences and started to think about if this would be a role that would best use my skillset. While at Hubbell, I worked on a project to analyze compensation issues per the compensation policy guidelines and worked with leadership for decisions on promotions and salary adjustments.

Additionally, one of my favorite classes during undergrad at Grand Valley was a compensation and benefits class. Not to mention, I knew that I wanted to work for a large international organization. Comp/ben was an area of HR that I knew would be important to understand, and working in the same department as Amber again was an added bonus. After accepting the role, I spent 2 years in that position. The HR department then went through a restructure, and a Talent Development Specialist role became available. I still had my position and really enjoyed the work I was doing, but I thought that getting additional experience in another COE (center of excellence) would be beneficial for being an HR manager one day.

The Talent Development Specialist job description was intriguing, and the reporting manager was someone who was a part of a policy committee I was leading at the time. I ended up moving into Talent Development, and loved every second of it. The team that I worked alongside made me feel encouraged and we accomplished many large initiatives. I like to joke that I was creating my own HR rotational program all along!

All this to say…everything that happened in the past lead me to this moment. Both of the roles that I held have perfectly prepared me for this role I have just began abroad.