Industries
Sectors I have worked in, not read about.
Plant HR is a different discipline from corporate HR. EPC workforce planning does not resemble annual manpower planning. A law firm is not a corporate with different furniture. Every sector below is one I have worked in directly.
Why sector experience actually matters
A great deal of HR consulting is sector-agnostic by necessity — the consultant knows a framework and applies it wherever they are engaged. That works for policy drafting and for process design. It works much less well the moment the problem is specific.
Consider three employers with what looks like the same problem: high attrition. In a BPO, attrition is structural, and the answer is a hiring pipeline built for continuous replacement plus targeted retention of the people you cannot afford to lose. In a law firm, attrition at the two-to-four year mark is a progression and work-allocation problem, and no amount of recruitment fixes it. On an EPC site, it is usually rotation policy and accommodation. Three sectors, one symptom, three unrelated causes.
The same is true of compliance. Contract labour is a footnote in a software company and the central legal exposure of a waste management business. A domestic enquiry in a Chennai automotive plant faces a standard of procedural scrutiny that the same enquiry in a Gurugram office would not. Knowing which of these you are dealing with is not something that can be picked up during an engagement.
The pages below set out, sector by sector, what actually goes wrong, where the statutory exposure concentrates, and what I would do about it.
Sectors covered
- 01 Manufacturing & Engineering
Plant HR is a different discipline from corporate HR. Workmen, contract labour, shift patterns, unions, disciplinary procedure and statutory registers are not variations on office HR — they are a separate body of practice.
→ - 02 Solar, EPC & Infrastructure
EPC workforce planning does not look like anything else in HR. Headcount is driven by project stage rather than by an annual plan, teams mobilise and demobilise at sites, and the contract labour component is large and geographically scattered.
→ - 03 Media, Cable & MSO
Cable and MSO operations run on a distributed footprint — dozens of branches, points of deployment and warehouses, with a workforce spread thinly across all of them. That geography, not the media business itself, is what makes the HR problem distinctive.
→ - 04 IT, ITeS & BPO
The IT and BPO sector's HR problem is velocity. Hiring volumes are high, attrition is structural rather than incidental, and compensation benchmarks move faster than any annual review cycle can track.
→ - 05 Law Firms & Professional Services
Professional services firms are unusual employers. The partnership structure changes how careers, compensation and performance work — and the people are also the entire product.
→ - 06 Startups & Funded Businesses
Startups get HR wrong in a specific and predictable order — and almost all of it is cheap to prevent and expensive to correct.
→ - 07 Waste Management & Environmental Services
Waste management combines a heavily contract-based site workforce with municipal contracting and environmental regulation — a compliance profile very few HR consultants have encountered.
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If your sector is not listed
The sectors above are the ones where I have direct operating experience, and I have listed only those deliberately. A great deal of HR work — compensation architecture, performance systems, POSH compliance, statutory audit, employment documentation — transfers across sectors without difficulty, and I take that work in industries not listed here.
What I will not do is claim sector depth I do not have. If your problem genuinely turns on knowing your industry and it is not one of mine, I will say so in the first conversation.