The best career move isn’t always a promotion or new job title, says Autodesk CPO

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Welcome to another installment of Tips from the Top, a series featuring HR leaders’ career advice for people professionals with big aspirations. Have insights you want to share? Get in touch here.

The best career move isn’t always a promotion. For Rebecca Pearce, Autodesk’s chief people officer, some of the decisions most critical to her development as an HR leader were those that strayed from the traditional career path.

“My career makes more sense in the rearview mirror than through the windscreen, as I often say,” Pearce told HR Brew.

After graduating university, Pearce was accepted into a graduate management training scheme—a kind of fast-tracked leadership training program offered in the UK—where she rotated through different HR functions, including generalist work, compensation and benefits, and learning and development.

She enjoyed learning different parts of the profession, and said that continued into her career. Pearce has worked in different industries, at companies of various sizes and maturity, and in multiple countries.

“They all pull on different types of HR skill or expertise, or the issues that you’re having to manage for the company, or the outcomes that company wants are different,” she said. “I just have loved being able to be in a career that transcends different industries and different countries, and gives you just that opportunity to experience so many different things.”

Pearce recommends junior HR pros consider opportunities that will help them broaden their knowledge and expertise, even if they stray from the traditional career path.

“I really would resist optimizing every decision for the next title,” she said. “Sometimes the right move is upwards, sometimes it’s sideways, sometimes it’s into a different geography or a business model or a discipline.”

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about an early career experience that helped shape the HR leader you are today.

One of the most formative things I did early in my career was deliberately put myself into very different environments…At the time, some of those moves probably looked quite random. Looking back, they were anything but.

They taught me that careers often make more sense in the rearview mirror than through the windscreen. Every experience added another lens through which I could understand a business, an organization, or a leadership challenge.

It also taught me not to optimize every career decision for the next title. I have generally tried to ask: What haven’t I learnt yet? Because breadth compounds. Sometimes the experience that looks least relevant on paper becomes the one you draw on most later.

What is one skill that you think every HR leader should develop early in their career?

Data literacy.

I don’t mean that every HR professional needs to become a data scientist…But I do think every HR professional should become an insights generalist. You should be comfortable looking at evidence, questioning it, understanding what sits underneath an average, distinguishing correlation from causation, spotting variation, and asking whether the data actually supports the conclusion being drawn.

Most importantly, you should know how to connect an insight to a business decision.

My own philosophy is to be data-led, but not data-determined. Data is incredibly powerful, but it needs context and judgement. And it also needs to be timely. There is little value in designing the perfect snow shovel in July.

How can early career HR professionals find a good mentor?

I wouldn’t over-engineer it. Look for people whose judgement you respect, rather than simply the most senior person you can find.

A good mentor is somebody you can learn from. Perhaps because they are excellent at something you are still developing, because they have navigated experiences you haven’t yet had, or because they see the world differently from you.

I would also resist looking for one perfect mentor. Different people can help you with different parts of your career. And sometimes the most useful person isn’t 10 levels above you. It may be a peer, a former manager, or someone in another discipline who challenges the way you think.

The important thing is to stay curious, ask for perspective and build genuine relationships rather than treating mentorship as a transaction.

What professional development opportunities do you think future HR leaders should pursue?

I would deliberately pursue breadth. The future HR leader is going to need to connect business strategy, organization, work, skills, leadership, technology, AI, productivity, culture, and increasingly data.

Spend time in an HR business-partnering role. I think that experience is particularly valuable because it teaches you what organizational problems actually look like in practice: They rarely arrive neatly framed with a perfect dataset and an obvious answer.

Build strong data and AI fluency. Learn about organization and work design, not just traditional talent processes.

Understand the economics of the business: how it makes money, where value is created, what drives productivity, and where the real trade-offs sit. And look for cross-functional transformation work where you have to operate with people outside HR.

What is the best advice you’ve received in your HR career?

A boss early in my career shared with me the quote: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” which is attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower. I live by that. Plans may not guarantee success, but the act of planning is crucial for adaptability and preparedness in uncertain situations.

What is the worst advice you’ve received in your HR career?

Early in my career, I was on the receiving end of a well-intentioned intervention that ultimately made a difficult situation harder to navigate. It reinforced the importance of understanding whether someone is looking for advice, support, or action before stepping in on their behalf.

These views do not necessarily speak for the company, but instead are the personal responses from individuals.