The Sovereign Career Hub

Hi, Which AI tool can you actually trust? Is the free version safe to use at work? And do you really have to read everything AI produces? HR professionals in UK small and medium-sized businesses ask me these questions wherever I go. So I’ve put the most popular ones together and split them into two episodes. In Part 1 this week, we cover choosing and trusting AI tools, and getting started. Each an...

Has anyone asked you yet whether their job is safe? If not, they will. I’m hearing it in corridors, in one-to-ones and in that quiet moment at the end of a meeting when someone hangs back. Telling them it’ll be fine isn’t an answer, because right now none of us really knows. Most leaders say they have a clear AI strategy. Far fewer say it has significantly changed how work is done. That gap is a p...

About Ruhul Ruhul Saiyed is Business Development Director at Ergaris HR, where she is extending her HR remit into commercial strategy and growth. She started out in social work, and that people-first grounding still shapes how she approaches every role. Since then she has worked in HR in the care sector, built an HR function from scratch for a tech start-up, coordinated the relocation of more than...

Hi, Last week I asked what you’re still researching that, if you’re honest, you already know enough to decide. If you ran a decision through the four tests I shared last week, you may have found something uncomfortable. You did know enough. And you still didn’t have a plan. That’s where this week’s episode picks up. Because while we keep reading, the decisions are still being made. Just not by us....

What happens when someone who has spent their career putting people at the centre of change ends up on the receiving end of it? That’s the question I put to Janet O’Hehir this week. Janet is an organisational development consultant and social scientist whose career runs from emergency services to magic circle law firms, in the UK and her native Australia. Janet spoke very openly about job hunting...

At midday today I'm running a free session for HR leaders who've been asked to own AI and are still working out where to start. If that feels familiar it's worth reading on. It seems to me that there are lots of professionals in this position and although most have issued the AI policy, completed an AI course, counted the MS Copilot licences, and the CEO still thinks they're scoping it - in truth,...

Shownotes What If I'm Missing Something Important? (The Sovereign Hub, Season 2, Episode 2) You've spent years being the person people trust to get it right. Then AI landed on your desk, and one question keeps stopping you from signing anything off: what if I'm missing something important? What if it goes wrong, and everyone wonders why you didn't see it coming? In this episode, Carolyn Shepherd g...

Hi, I had a different episode ready for you this week. Then a researcher walked out of Anthropic saying the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, four chief executives said the industry should slow down, the President of the United States said it shouldn’t, and Sheryl Crow told Instagram to pay attention. So that episode has moved to next week, because this one...

Hi, Six months into hosting the show, I noticed something changing. People weren’t bringing me career questions any more. They were bringing me decision questions. Have we thought this through? Are we moving too fast? Who carries the can if it goes wrong? So the show has evolved with them. The Sovereign Career Hub is now The Sovereign Hub. Guest interviews stay, and you’ll hear more solo episodes...

Ep 13: Who Cares if the Boss is Watching? First, Some Important Context In 2006 Gaelle Watson was given the task of running virtual classroom sessions. The internet was different, the infrastructure was different, and so was the mindset: she had to fight her corner to show that the same learning happens behind a screen, and that people can be just as active there. What that work came down to was t...

Somewhere inside a council, a woman whose job was to assess support applications for children with additional needs was given an instruction. ‘Turn down 98 out of every 100.’Jess Rad heard that first-hand, from an advocate she paid to help her fight for her own daughter. It took Jess three attempts to secure an EHCP, the legal document that guarantees a child support at school. She did it alone, p...

First, Some Important Context It was a Friday lunchtime. Not a great time to post on LinkedIn, as anyone who watches the algorithm will tell you. Caroline Daniel posted anyway. By the evening she was watching the numbers climb past anything she had seen before. Her usual 5,000 views became 300,000. Three thousand people downloaded the free tool she was offering. And the shape of her business chang...

Ep 15 – Build Your Own Copilot Agent The ready-made agents come close, but this week you build the one that does your job, your way, with your documents. Valerie Merrill builds a Copilot agent from scratch, live and step by step, including the shortcut that makes it easy: Copilot Chat writes the instructions for you. In the best Blue Peter tradition, she even has one she made earlier. In this epis...

Show Notes: Ep 14 Named: 68 Steps to Hand to Copilot AnalystWebsite: [ merrillconsultants.com ]( https://www.merrillconsultants.com/ )LinkedIn: [linkedin.com/in/merrillvalerie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrillvalerie/) Mentioned in this episode Jobscaping® Carolyn's original framework for mapping your work into three zones, green to delegate, amber to collaborate, red to protect, so you lead AI...

Valerie Merrill Valerie Merrill is a Microsoft and people skills specialist, Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute, award-winning L&D podcaster and one of the UK's most experienced Copilot trainers. Website: https://www.merrillconsultants.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrillvalerie/ Jobscaping® Carolyn Shepherd's framework for helping people consciously redesign their work...

Shownotes: Valerie Merrill, FLPI. Learning and Development SpecialistDirector, Merrill Consultants Website: merrillconsultants.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/merrillvalerie The Sovereign Career Hub Substack: substack.com/@thesovereigncareerhub Carolyn on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/carolynjshepherd Emmeline AI: emmeline.ai Jobscaping® Carolyn’s original framework for mapping your work into three zone...

The First Part of the New Series If work is arriving faster than you can clear it, and you have been handing work to AI because everyone says you should, but without a real plan. If you have a creeping feeling that soon nothing will quite sound like you, and that you could be held accountable for work you didn’t do. It seems unfair, and yet the alternative, falling behind in the AI skills race, fe...

Before you touch the technology, you have to answer one question. Why would I use this? Not as a policy. Not as a business case. As a person. That is the question Erica Farmer , this week’s guest, puts at the centre of every AI transformation conversation she has. And it is the question most organisations skip entirely. Erica is founder of QuantumRise, a keynote speaker and futurist on people-firs...

The agent is not the starting point. The data is. That is what every business rushing toward AI implementation is missing. And it is costing them more than they realise. Jonny Winn is AI Strategy Director at The One Point, a Yorkshire-based managed service provider working with SMBs, enterprise and public sector organisations. He came to this role through fifteen years in creative production, a bu...

Show Notes: Ep 08 – L&D's Four Enablers with Jo Cook Jo Cook Editor, Training Journal Director, Lightbulb Moment Training Journal: trainingjournal.com Jo's author page: trainingjournal.com/author/jocook Lightbulb Moment: lightbulbmoment.info LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jocooklightbulb Mentioned in this episode TJ L&D Influence Report 2026 Introduces the Readiness Enablers Index and highlights practi...

Thank you to my guest Andrew Jacobs Andrew is a learning strategist and organisational impact advisor, and founder of Llarn Learning . He is a Fellow of the Learning Performance Institute (FLPI). His work focuses on shifting organisations away from training delivery and towards capability, performance and measurable impact. His experience spans private and public sector organisations, from financi...

Most HR functions are genuinely busy. But busy is not the same as valuable, and pace is not the same as impact. The case for HR investment keeps not landing. Not because boards don’t care about people, but because HR keeps making that case in HR language to people who think in commercial language. Wellbeing. Culture. Engagement. These things matter enormously. They are not the conversation the CFO...

Nebel Crowhurst is a Fractional Chief People Officer and strategic people leader who helps organisations build workplaces where people, culture and performance thrive. She partners with CEOs and leadership teams to design people strategies that unlock potential, strengthen culture and accelerate growth, particularly during moments of transformation and scale. Her experience spans global brands and...

Most AI rollouts don’t fail because of the technology. They quietly run into trouble in the gap between what leaders assume is in place and what their people actually have waiting for them in the room. Licences that aren’t quite right. Permissions that were never updated. A SharePoint nobody’s tended to in years. A workforce that’s already using AI in ways nobody officially knows about. This week...

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