Five minutes with… Alison Zada, project lead in learning and organisational development at SunCorp

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
To find a role that gives me work that I am passionate about
 
What challenges do you think HR will face in the next 10 years?
I think the challenges facing HR are similar to those facing the business we support – with innovation becoming our ‘modus operandi’, managing remote and increasingly diverse teams, empowering our functional workforces to collaborate.  HR’s additional challenge is to have the right people strategy and capabilities to support and strengthen the organisational strategy and ensure our businesses can adapt to those challenges to remain competitive, both now and in the future within a constantly changing employment landscape.
 
What is the most interesting aspect of your role?
I love to work in OD roles where my primary focus is around building capability that aligns to our people strategy.  Leading initiatives that create simple frameworks and tools to enable people at all levels of the organisation to understand how their individual capabilities contribute to the organisational strategy gives me a good sense of purpose.
 
What do you feel is your biggest professional achievement to date?
It’s been a great experience to lead initiatives that have improved the employee and leader experience of development and career planning with an interactive tool to demonstrate talent mobility in real time.  To gain external recognition for the work through Good Design Australia and Human Capital has also given my team and I a great sense of achievement.
 
How would you sum up HR professionals in two words?
People innovators
 
Complete this sentence: If I weren’t in HR, I’d be…
A nutritionist