Aadil Thakur, Leadership and Management Learning Delivery Manager
What is your job title and what year did you join the HRA?
I am a Leadership and Management Learning Delivery Manager and joined the HRA in October 2023.
What motivated you to work in this field?
Learning and development (L&D) was a career that I fell into whilst working in retail alongside studying. Due to my customer service and people skills, I received various promotions, eventually becoming a store trainer and gaining a qualification in HR. This role really helped me understand my passion to teach and help people learn.
I then took a leap into the apprenticeship field where I completed a L&D qualification for an NHS organisation and became a specialist in creating and assessing accredited courses.
I then joined another NHS organisation where I learned how to provide L&D consultancy and service improvements. I also delivered a range of continuous professional development (CPD) and Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) accredited qualifications. This organisation had a powerful impact on me and my journey to grow and become more competent and confident.
When the opportunity came up at the HRA, I wanted to learn more about the organisation and what it does. My manager shared their vision for this role which is to create a sustainable staff learning culture that can have a great impact on research. I was really engaged and wanted to apply.
Joining the HRA has allowed me to make an impact and my manager and team are really creative and brilliant. I have also been blessed to work with other departments who are great experts and supportive, especially the project management, HR and communications team.
What I would like to emphasise to people looking at joining the HRA is that there is strong support from senior leadership to create pathways for staff to achieve career success, whilst making a huge impact on the wider research community.
What would you like us to know about your work at the HRA?
The L&D team collaborates with internal and external stakeholders, such as arm's length bodies and NHS organisations, to create a talent pathway to help people understand how they can develop their skill set, become a specialist in their field and identify potential pathways for growth.
The hybrid nature of the HRA allows us to create different types of training, and we welcome colleagues to contribute ideas for learning packages that would help to improve their department, service or the organisation.
My work will be to continuously improve the L&D services and provide learning solutions for individuals, teams and services.
What are the interesting challenges in your work?
Supporting people and developing learning to meet their needs is really interesting but can be challenging at times, as we have a wide range of learners and everyone is different. We hope we meet all of our staff’s needs but are always receptive to learn about ways that we can improve.
Do you have any career tips to share?
The HRA has a good range of policies and support networks that allow you to shadow or observe what other departments are doing. This opportunity gave me a good understanding of how to build better support networks for my projects while allowing me to explore future opportunities.
What’s your favourite part of working at the HRA?
I am biased as I really enjoy working in the L&D team. We have an amazing team who are making a big impact on the organisation, but the collaboration from other staff through working on different projects and having different interactions really allows us to improve our service.
Outside of that, the HRA is really unique in that the majority of staff work remotely. As someone who's life revolves around London (I have travelled across England), it’s interesting to see some of the locations that other staff share.
Outside of the responsibilities of your role, what is there to get involved in at the HRA?
The staff networks and the People Group have a huge impact on the organisation, which is really nice as there are representatives for all of our needs.
I also feel the senior leadership team have allowed me a platform on many occasions to give my views on ways that the organisation can be improved, and they have used that feedback to make effective changes to process or policies.