Shreya Thomas.
For Shreya Thomas, a career in human resources was never going to follow a single, predictable route. Her academic and professional choices have moved between human resource management, luxury brand management, digital marketing, learning transformation and talent strategy. Rather than treating those experiences as separate tracks, she has increasingly looked at what connects them: people, experiences and the environments in which individuals build their careers.
Today, Shreya Thomas works as Assistant Manager - Talent Management and DEI at Blue Star Limited, within the Group HR Centre of Excellence. Her professional focus includes talent management and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the group level. Her early career has spanned diverse organisations, giving her exposure to learning and development, talent management, recruitment, HR analytics, workforce planning and performance management.
That breadth has shaped an emerging HR professional interested in a question that is becoming increasingly relevant to organisations: how can workplaces be designed not simply to employ people, but to help different kinds of people develop, contribute and build sustainable careers?
Shreya Thomas deliberately built a diverse career across industries and HR disciplines, with each experience adding another lens to how she understands people, talent and organisational strategy.
At Blue Star Limited, her current role brings together two areas that are becoming increasingly connected within modern HR: talent and inclusion. Working at the Group HR CoE, she supports talent management and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across multiple businesses.
Her perspective on HR is also influenced by her exposure in different workplace settings. In her own account of her journey, Shreya describes moving into manufacturing and project-based work as an opportunity to view workplace issues through a different lens. Questions around gender balance, workforce strategy, returnship opportunities, talent development and everyday workplace behaviour have become part of the broader areas she wants to explore.
She believes the strongest HR functions sit at the intersection of business strategy and organisational capability; anticipating future talent needs, strengthening leadership pipelines and enabling transformation at scale. Culture, in this context, becomes an organisational enabler: shaped by the systems, behaviours and decisions.
Shreya Thomas's education does not follow a conventional single-discipline HR path either.
Her academic journey reflects the multidisciplinary perspective she brings to her work. She holds a Masters in HRM from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, and Manipal University Jaipur.
She later pursued a PGP in Luxury Brand Management from Istituto Marangoni, graduating with distinction, an experience that broadened her understanding of brand, business and consumer-led thinking.
She is also CAPM® certified by PMI®, complementing her HR background with a structured approach to project management and execution.
Together, these experiences have given Shreya a multidisciplinary lens that brings together people, business, brand and transformation, perspectives she continues to apply to talent and organisational challenges.
Talent transformation is increasingly broader than hiring. It can involve understanding what skills an organisation needs, how those capabilities are developed, how leaders are prepared and how employees navigate changing roles.
Her experience with a leading pharmaceutical and life sciences organisation offers a clear example of this broader approach. She worked in L&D Transformation which included supporting the move towards a skills-based model and enterprise-wide capability alignment.
These exposures point to an aspect of modern HR that is increasingly difficult to separate from technology and data: understanding people remains central, but the systems supporting talent decisions are becoming more structured and data-driven.
Her early field exposure across a leading FMCG organisation, a major fashion and retail business and a consumer electricals and lighting organisation gave her a closer view of different workforce environments, she was introduced to talent management, young talent and succession planning, while at CGCEL, she gained experience in sales HR, talent acquisition and people analytics.
Taken together, these experiences provide exposure to HR at different points in the employee lifecycle from attracting and assessing talent to developing people, managing performance and understanding workforce data.
That broader view is important to the way she describes the culture she wants to contribute to. Her stated vision centers on workplaces where people do not have to fit a single mould to succeed, where diversity extends beyond representation numbers and where technology improves work without making it less human.
People decisions are rarely based on one source of information. HR data, performance indicators, workforce capability, employee experience and organizational requirements can all influence how HR teams approach talent.
Consumer durables, for example, she worked on a large-scale hiring project across two BUs, driving recruitment efforts across North and South India and talent analytics related to engagement, career movement and attrition. At GSK, she worked with learning systems, learner requests, skill profiling and process data. At ABFRL, she supported talent development journey across BUs as part of CoE.
This combination of data and people considerations is central to strategic HR. Numbers can indicate where a workforce challenge exists, but understanding the reasons behind those numbers requires organisational and human context.
Shreya Thomas's professional journey has also received recognition through the Business Mint Nationwide Under 30 - 2026 Awards, where she was recognised in the 30 Under 30 Emerging Talent & Culture Transformation Young Leader - 2026 category.
The recognition comes alongside a career that is still at an early stage but already spans multiple HR disciplines and industries. Rather than representing a destination, it forms one milestone within a broader professional journey focused on talent, culture and business partnering.
Shreya Thomas herself frames the recognition in a similar way. In reflecting on the award, she describes it as a milestone she is grateful for, while viewing it less as a conclusion and more as encouragement to continue exploring what can be built.
That distinction is significant for an emerging professional. The focus is not simply on the title of an award, but on the direction of the work that follows it.
Shreya Thomas's career offers one example of how emerging HR professionals can develop through varied experiences rather than a strictly linear functional path.
Her interests span talent management, leadership development, employee relations, change management, enterprise transformation, and workforce capability.
The common thread is an interest in building systems and approaches that people can actually use.
Shreya Thomas describes herself as someone who enjoys taking an idea that is still "a little messy" and turning it into something practical. That approach appears across her professional experience, from learning-system transformation and process standardisation to workforce planning and organisational design.
Her reference to Legally Blonde also captures a personal philosophy she wants to bring into HR: not assuming that there is one obvious profile for success and being comfortable entering spaces where one's background may look different.
Shreya Thomas is still early in her career, and that is an important part of understanding her professional story. Her experience is substantial in breadth, but her own account makes clear that she remains interested in learning, questioning and experimenting with new approaches to work.
Her stated ambition is not simply to find a place within the future of work, but to contribute to making workplaces better through more inclusive opportunities, stronger talent decisions, thoughtful use of technology and cultures that recognise employees as people with lives beyond the workplace.
That makes her journey less about following a predetermined HR career ladder and more about testing how different disciplines can come together and be strategic partner.
For an emerging HR professional, the next phase may bring new responsibilities, new organisational challenges and new questions about talent and culture. What remains consistent is the direction: building workplaces where people and business needs are considered together.
