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If you shopped at Comics To Astonish in Columbia, Maryland, between 1999 and 2002, you might’ve been rung up at the register by Michael Wiles.
That assistant manager gig was Wiles’ first foray into the workforce, and an experience that would remain relevant throughout his career in HR. Today, he’s an employee relations business partner at edtech company 2U.
“Working with the public, you’re meeting different people all the time. Working in a shop, you’re meeting, also, the same people over and over. You’re working with your regular customers, which is very analogous to working in human resources,” Wiles told HR Brew.
He reminiscenced with HR Brew about the people lessons he picked up managing a comic-book store.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What did you learn from your first job?
It really gave me that initial experience on how to see things from another person’s perspective, and how to see what they need, and how to understand their frustrations, and also the things that they enjoy the most and how to cater to that. And that initial experience, looking back, has been very critical to my work in HR, and specifically, in employee relations.
Did you learn lessons while working at the comic bookstore that you apply in your current role?
So much of what I do in employee relations and in human resources is operating in the moment, and I think working that initial first job was always just me operating at the moment. It was me alone in the shop…So, being able to operate in the moment, being able to think quickly, to think through things quickly and make the right decision, that was critical…Every day in employee relations, it’s a lot of the same. You’re in that moment thinking, “What is the correct path? What is the equitable path? What does this person need, and how do I balance that with the needs of the business?”
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It sounds like customer-service roles can help train HR pros.
You’re constantly navigating the psychology of people…navigating people and how people interact, and that experience of human interaction is what makes every day a little different. And that’s, to me, what is most engaging about what I do—knowing that that challenge is always there, and that opportunity, similarly, is also always there. And again, it comes back to customer service.
How did you end up in HR?
I graduated with an undergraduate degree in English and technical writing, and I worked for several years as an editor in publishing, and then I worked as a marketer, writing copy. I was a journalist for a while…But then I had an epiphany that in the roles that I had, the things I liked the most about them weren’t necessarily the tactical, execution aspects of it. It was the supporting colleagues, providing training, providing development…I thought to myself, “What do I really want to be doing with my career? Where do I think I’ll always be compelled to rise to the challenge?”
Human resources was that answer. So, I made that decision to transition away from working in that technical writing and publishing space, and return to school, get a graduate degree, and transition into human resources. And then, as I navigated that entry into HR, I really found myself drawn to the employee relations aspect of the field...If you enjoy these parts of the job, the people development, the training, those types of things, that should be what you do. That should be your focus. It shouldn’t just be part of what you enjoy. That should be what you do…and after thinking it over, there was no doubt in my mind, “This is what I should be doing with the remaining time I have in the workforce.”