The third episode of Talent Management’s new podcast is now live! This bi-monthly podcast will host talent and HR professionals from across the globe sharing their stories, learnings and big ideas and ambitions for the future of talent management. The third episode features a conversation between Talent Management’s managing editor, Ave Rio, and Cari Bohley, vice president of talent management at Peraton.
The following is an excerpt from Talent Management’s podcast. To hear the full conversation, including Bohley’s thoughts on hybrid work culture, the role of managers, DEI and more click here.
Ave Rio: Hello and welcome to the Talent Management. I’m Ave Rio, Talent Mangement’s managing editor, and I’m so happy to be here hosting our third episode!
The world of work has transformed, and there’s surely more change on the horizon. At the forefront of this transformation is our people, and prioritizing their engagement and connection, helping them feel a sense of belonging and purpose, and building strong and safe spaces in our organizations is paramount. We hope you will join us along this podcast journey and tune in every month to hear from leading talent and HR professionals from across the globe as they share their stories, their learnings, and their big ideas and ambitions for the future of talent management.
Without further ado, I’d like to give a warm welcome to our guest today, Cari Bohley, vice president of talent management at Peraton.
Welcome, Cari. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. We’ll get into a little bit of everything, but I’d like to start with just hearing about your career journey and your role now at Peraton. Tell us about your background and how you navigated to where you are today in your career.
Cari Bohley: It’s definitely been a, I don’t know if it’s a non-traditional journey through HR. But when I was in college, my undergrad was in international relations and I am doing nothing with that right now, but I did get a couple of jobs out of college and in each one I learned a little bit more and eventually I ended up in a position where I needed to find a new position in the company.
I’d come back from a maternity leave. And the position that I was previously in was no longer available. And I had a project management professional certification, which is a hard certification to get, not impossible, obviously, but very difficult and challenging. And one of the women who I worked with said, ‘Hey, you have your PMP. We need people to do PMP training. What do you think?’ And I was like, what? I’ve never done that before. And it scared the heck out of me because I also had to do a lot of traveling and I had small kids at home, but my husband and I talked about it and felt that it was the right decision to make. That started my career in learning and development.
I worked with that client. I did the training. I worked on developing content for that training. And as a result of that, when our company implemented a corporate university I became part of it. I was an instructor. I was a course designer and I thought it was really interesting. But what really pushed me over the over the edge, if you will, in a good way, was when I was responsible for our leadership development program. And when you’re working with people in a leadership development program, you’re working with really high caliber, high performing individuals, and it really made an impact on me when I helped them make decisions on what to do with their careers and think about how they could approach different problems and situations. And that really solidified, my passion around learning and development.
And then over time, I just took on increasingly larger roles in that company where by the time I left the company, I was the director of learning and development, and it was a very small company. But then things change. I took a position, a very similar position with another company, but it was like 10 times the size. And so just over the years I took on progressively challenging roles in learning and development. And also expanding into organizational effectiveness and some of those ancillary areas in HR to really help organizations improve and help individuals improve. And then finally I landed here at Peraton earlier this year. And it’s been a great move for me so far. I’ve got a lot of great people that I’m working with and a lot of really juicy programs to get done this year and next year.
To hear the full conversation, including Bohley’s thoughts on hybrid work, managers and more click here. This transcript has been edited and cut for clarity by Talent Management Associate Editor Calvin Coffee.
