Karri Wiggers

I attribute my success to endless learning and an unrelenting work ethic. I've always had this genuine desire to learn - to read about things, get into the mess of it, and just really understand how things work. That curiosity and willingness to dive deep into the details has been a constant throughout my career. The other piece is my work ethic, and I say that one laughing because I'm thinking of what my mentors have told me over the years. They've pointed out that my ability to work, to always be working and getting things done, is one of my strengths. But that doesn't mean work is all I do in life - I do a lot of other things and I have a good work-life balance. It's more about getting it all done, you know? That combination of endless learning and the discipline to follow through and complete what I start has really been the foundation of everything I've accomplished.

The best career advice I've ever received is to stay true to yourself. In the work that I do in HR, you often know exactly what doing the right thing looks like. And regardless of who's asking you to do something different than what you know is right, the advice that has stuck with me is simple: stay true to yourself. Sometimes people will push you in a different direction, or ask you to compromise on what you know is the right path. But if you stay grounded in your integrity and your values, and you trust yourself to do what you know is right no matter who's asking, that will carry you through. That's been the guidance that has shaped how I approach my work and the decisions I make.

My advice is to learn everything and try everything. What happens in HR a lot of times is that someone will enter the field in one area - maybe compensation, benefits, or employee relations - and then they stay there. They don't learn the other functions or explore the other areas. Unless you're willing to do that, or brave enough to do that, you miss how all these pieces connect. You can't necessarily be the best compensation professional if you've only learned compensation. You have to learn the other areas - learning and development, benefits, employee relations - and understand how they all interconnect. I actually just hired a benefits person who is amazing at benefits, but she had only ever worked in benefits. So I put her in each area of HR for two weeks, doing a rotation through each function, so she could learn how benefits impacts employee relations, how it supports people who might be struggling with performance issues, how programs like the Employee Assistance Program can help reduce stress and improve outcomes. Spending time in those other areas of HR helps you understand how they impact each other, and that makes you a much stronger professional overall. Be brave enough to explore the different parts of the field, even when they're unfamiliar. That curiosity and willingness to stretch yourself will make you better at whatever you ultimately specialize in.

The biggest challenge in the field right now is employee retention, and it's happening for really good reasons, which makes it complex. There is just so much opportunity out there now. With remote work becoming normalized after COVID, Alaskans can now work anywhere in the world, and people have access to opportunities they never had before. That's great - it keeps ideas fresh, brings innovation, and creates positive movement. But the downside is that people are changing jobs so quickly now that they never reach that settling-in period. When I first started in HR, or even a decade ago, you would see people stay 5 to 6 years before they started to feel stagnant and moved on. Now I'm seeing two years, maybe two and a half. And I think Alaska is a few years behind the lower 48, so we're probably about to enter that one-year mark that other places are already experiencing. The problem is that's not even long enough to get good at the thing you're doing. You spend six months learning what you're doing, and then another six months, but you haven't necessarily mastered it. You're losing that knowledge base and that master class level of expertise. It's like this constant period of everyone being new - you're new, and you're new, and you're new. They're leaving for good reasons, not because the environment is terrible, but because they want to be more successful elsewhere. But it means we never get past the learning mode into the development mode. We're not seeing people stay long enough to do the strategic work that really moves things forward.

The values that are most important to me are honesty and faith, and I don't think they change whether I'm at home or at work. I actually just led an entire project at work where we redid our organizational values, and what I talk to leadership about most often is this: who we are at home doesn't necessarily change when we get to work. The things that we value most in our personal life are the same in our professional life. Honesty is a really big one for me. There's not a lot that we can't work through at home or at work if we're just honest about it. If we make a mistake and we're honest about it and we own it, we can usually figure out pretty much anything. So honesty is probably one of my biggest values. And then faith - obviously faith at work and at home. Every day at work I look up and I'm like, oh please help me, Jesus. But it's also about having faith in people, having faith that we're there to do right by people. Those values are true at home and at work, and I believe they should be. Who you are doesn't change just because you walk through a different door.