Northern Lights College has a new face in the Human Resources (HR) Department.
Sherri-Lynn Lutz is the new Executive Director of Human Resources for the college and is excited to work with staff on bargaining, organizational development, and all other aspects of the position.
She spent the last five years with Northern Health as the Human Resources Advisor at the Dawson Creek Hospital.
“There’s just so much to HR, there’s always a challenge and nothing is the same all the time, I find it very intriguing,” she says, noting that an organization’s most valuable asset is their people.
Sherri wasn’t always in HR. She started her career in health care as a dental assistant for what is now called Peace Country Dental. She eventually moved over to the Dawson Creek Health Unit to continue that line of work.
“I had young kids, and the hours were better,” she says. “Monday to Friday was a lot easier.”
While at the health unit, she branched out into hearing testing and was among the first to do early hearing screenings on infants in Dawson Creek.
From there, she took on a management role for home support services, even taking the health care assistant program through Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University herself so she better understood what they do.
It was during this time that she discovered she really enjoyed the human resources and labour relations side of the job. With that spark being ignited, Sherri went on to earn her human resource management certificate from Athabasca University.
While at Northern Health, she found that keeping her door open for anyone to come talk to her was the best way to get things done. She welcomes anyone to come chat with her, whether they’re managers or unionized employees.
“I don’t want to be the scary HR person, that’s not my goal,” she said of her new role with NLC.
“I like a nice, friendly, respectful workplace, and from what I hear with the college, that’s exactly it. I’ve never heard anything negative about the atmosphere at the college.”
