| | SEPTEMBER 2024MANAGEHRMAGAZINE.COM8In MyOpinionBy Connie Sandros, Vice President of Learning and Engagement, Freudenberg Sealing TechnologiesINCLUSIVE ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENTI've heard it said that the most interesting people don't know what they want to do until they are forty. If that is right, then I am on my way to being interesting. I started my career in retail management, then became a schoolteacher and followed that by managing a few not-for-profit programs in the education and workforce readiness sphere before I was introduced to a person doing the career I most wanted. From that moment on, I started pursuing organization development and HR, and now I find myself in my mid-forties, enjoying a career I never dreamed of in my twenties or even thirties. My journey to the position of vice president of Human Resources Americas and Global Learning and Engagement started in earnest in 2016 when I joined Freudenberg NOK Sealing Technologies as a corporate trainer after relocating with my family from Canada to the United States. Although it was a significant career step backward, I was happy to make a start in HR and to gain work in my new country of residence. Fortunately, it didn't take long for me to be promoted to a global management position, followed by a global director position and finally to the position of vice president of learning and engagement in 2021. In 2022, I added the dual role of vice president of HR for the region Americas to my responsibilities. In my current role, I am responsible for the transactional and strategic sides of HR. I am responsible for the strategic direction and execution of the company in the learning and engagement topics; I am responsible for the compliance, recruitment, compensation, benefits, and process innovation in our 22 sites, spread across Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Additionally, this year, I took over responsibility for guiding the strategic direction and execution of the company in the sphere of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the business partner role for our corporate and sales functional leaders. I manage a corporate team in Plymouth, Michigan, and a learning and engagement team headquartered in Weinheim, Germany.From my position, I see a few trends that I expect will have a lasting impact on how we work in human resources. I expect that data analytics will continue to increase, and we will be able to analyze and support business objectives in ways we've never known before. I also expect digitalization to increase in general as companies embrace AI solutions. We, for example, are already using several AI products to create just-in-time training solutions at a minimal cost. I also expect that we will continue to see upheaval in the labor markets for the next few years; after surviving a global pandemic and an inflation crisis, it seems people are looking for something different than the traditional 40-hour work week, and I think we will grapple with that until we find a collective new model of employment that fits the workforce of the future. Also, when considering the workforce of the future, one thing is non-negotiable. It will be more diverse and more equal than ever. As I mentioned earlier, I think there are a lot of technological solutions that will transform HR in the next five years. The first is Connie Sanders
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