One-on-One with Sarita Nair

While most people go their whole lives without having a hippo story, Sarita Nair has managed to acquire two.

The first: Nair, secretary of New Mexico’s Workforce Solutions Department, was on a Zambezi River canoe safari with a friend years ago when their boat landed smack atop a hippo’s back.

“It lifted us up out of the water, then slammed us back into the water and bit through the boat,” Nair said. “It turned out it was a piece of the boat that cut me, but at the time, I didn’t know if it was an animal cut.”

There’s more.

“So I was bleeding, and there were crocodiles. We had to keep going because there was no other way out,” she said.

Nair has since faced many other (non-hippo) predicaments in her career as general counsel for the state auditor, chief administrative officer for the city of Albuquerque and head of Workforce Solutions, a job she has held for the last two years.

A recent challenge, for example, was her department’s onsite management of unemployment claims as a wildfire raged through Ruidoso. But a more longstanding and intractable issue is a shortage of workers that began plaguing the state after the COVID-19 pandemic. New Mexico now has a 32,000-person gap between the number of people who are unemployed and looking for work and the number of jobs that need to be filled.

It was the pandemic that also posed the greatest challenges while she was top executive at the city.

Which brings us to the second hippo story: Nair was making a visit to the zoo during COVID when she got the chance to pet a baby hippo. Little hippos, she said, like to be stroked “on the wall of their mouth … which (feels) really rough.”

Said Nair, “When I got to meet the baby, it was very much full circle for me. I felt like, ‘OK, I’m at peace. I made peace with the hippos.’”

What do you think has made you successful in your career?

“Hard work and luck. I think there’s lots of luck involved in every successful person’s life. Sometimes we don’t give enough credit to luck, but I just think whatever I’m doing, I try to be the best at it. I try to work really hard, every single day.”

What is your department doing to ease the worker shortage?

“One (initiative) is Be Pro, Be Proud, and that is a semi-tractor trailer truck that we take to various communities. It’s very cool. When I heard about it, I was skeptical. When I saw it, I was a believer. We know that some of our lowest labor force participation rates are men 18 to 35 … and so we go into the community and promote these occupations. We tell people, ‘If you do the welding simulator and you think, ‘I could do this,’ you could go right over to a big screen, you could tap on it and you can find out what the average wage is, what the wage is for an expert welder. Then, you can tap on another button and see all the training programs in the state.’ So we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to see themselves in these careers.”

What has been a difficulty in your life?

“Fortunately, I’m not a sandwich generation. My daughter’s fully grown. But I’m at the age where my family’s getting older and, like everybody in our generation, it’s really hard on so many levels. I cook for my mom. I cook her lunches for the week every Sunday because that’s something I can do. And my sister takes full-time care of her. That’s been really hard just because, you know, you start with this vibrant, amazing parent and then life happens. So that’s been a challenge.”

What was your first job?

“When I was about 7 or 8, my mom worked at Carnegie Mellon (University), and it was the early ages of computing. Her grad students would pay me to go to the building across campus where the printouts came out on the dot-matrix printer. They had the tear-off things on the side. I would go over there, I’d pick up the printouts and carry them back. They would give me whatever change they had in their pocket, and I felt so important and valuable. That’s what I want everyone to find in work is not just the money, but the value and the sense of importance and belonging.”

How has being a woman of color affected your career?

“On the downside, there have been many times when people just assumed that I wasn’t … the person in charge, when I was. I’m not normally the person who would sit down and assert their authority. I had to learn to do that. Also, it’s been a blessing in many ways. When I was a corporate lawyer, I felt like clients opened up to me because I’m a woman. I remember a client facing a really difficult time in his business, asking me to practice with him how he was going to tell his wife. I don’t think that would have happened if I had been a man. I was happy to be there for him.”

How do you deal with career stress?

“I meditate. I do believe in doing nothing as a powerful tool to rest your brain and your body. A lot of people feel guilty when they’re doing nothing. I think it’s really, really important that we do that sometimes.”

Was the African hippo encounter the scariest experience for you?

“That and I was hit by a drunk driver on I-40 and ended up perpendicular on Louisiana. I also walked away from that.”

Are you normally just a lucky person?

“It feels like a jinx to say that. I have probably exhausted all of my lives at this point. I’m on the last one, so I’ve got to make it count.”