It is a striking but also an honest admission. “Actually, I wasn’t really considering an internal switch”, Wilma reflects. “I had a great time as an administrative assistant at the Faculty of Law. It always appealed to me to be able to help others with their questions. From that point of view, I found the work done by HR colleagues interesting. Around 2010, I got the opportunity to do a Personnel Management course alongside my job. After completing that, I applied for an HR position outside the university once, but that transition did not work out in the end. However, the head of HR at the Faculty of Law back then knew that I had completed the Personnel Management course and, a few years later, gave me the hint about a vacancy for my current HR position within our university. Only then did the ball start rolling.”
Empty inbox
In retrospect, Wilma realises that she needed that push. “The longer you sit somewhere, the harder it becomes to make another move. But when I was invited to the interview for the vacancy for my current position and everything became more concrete, I was like: I have to take this opportunity. It was now or never.”
Still, she found the transition nerve-wracking at first. “In my previous job, I knew everything and everyone. This made me feel like I was starting from scratch in my new position: I had to prove myself all over again. In the first month, I regularly thought: ‘What have I got myself into?’ Everything was new: at HR, I suddenly had to familiarise myself with the Collective Labour Agreement and the Selection Model, among other things, which I had previously only dealt with indirectly. My inbox also remained scarily empty for the first few weeks. That made me feel unsettled. In retrospect, I was too impatient at the beginning: I wanted far too much.”
Wilma received a lot of support from her new colleagues during that period. “They reassured me and took me on board well. They said: ‘Take it easy, because you’ll soon be busy enough.’ And that did prove to be the case. At the time, my new colleagues gave me a tremendously warm welcome and showed me around everything in a nice way. As a result, even after the first month, I noticed that I started to like my new job more and more: it became more and more familiar. In retrospect, therefore, I never regretted my switch.”
‘University from a different angle’
Now, Wilma has been working as one of the two HR officers for the Information & Library Services (ILS) division for a number of years. She is the first point of contact for colleagues in that division who have HR-related questions, about things like leave, absence, vacancies and various schemes. “My job is very diverse; I help colleagues with questions they can't figure out on their own and I inform them in time so they don't get any surprises about certain schemes. What I like is that now that I work in a central division, I have got to know the university from the other side. For example, I now know that our organisation is much broader than I used to think when I was still working at the Faculty of Law.”
From her own experience, Wilma would definitely recommend an internal job transfer to colleagues. “Radboud University is a nice employer with good secondary terms of employment. You can go in many different directions here in terms of your career. Of course, an internal transfer is nerve-wracking at first, but it is really a matter of ‘just doing it’. Trust yourself and the guidance of your new colleagues. A switch will give you new knowledge, new contacts and new energy. All of this did me good.”
Is your current job still right for you? Get started with your career profile and check out this information on what an internal transfer entails.