Education for a Career in Human Resource Management
From a Different Tower
By Peter Boxall and Giles Burch
Professor Peter Boxall (PhD Monash) was the founding director of the HR Diploma at The University of Auckland. Since 1988, over 300 HR practitioners have graduated from this programme. He has worked as an HR consultant and as a University Head of Department.
Prior to moving to The University of Auckland in January 2005 as a Senior Lecturer in HRM, Giles Burch (PhD King’s College London), managed a portfolio career, combining consultancy with teaching and research roles across a number of London Universities. A Chartered Occupational Psychologist, he has a particular expertise in psychological assessment for selection and development, leadership development, personal and executive coaching.
Academic qualifications, practical experience and personal development should be seen as the building blocks of a professional career.
Human resource management is about the management of work and people in organisations. It is a crucial process that forms part of the accountabilities of virtually every kind of manager. It takes place whether or not an organisation can afford to hire or consult HR specialists.
Our role as researchers and teachers of HRM is to help educate both generalist and specialist managers for this vital role. In this article, we share our thoughts on education for HR specialists. These ideas have been formed over a long period of time.
Value of HR education
What is the value of education in HRM? Higher education in HRM is successful when it:
- exposes individuals to the major theoretical principles and debates around the management of work and people;
- builds their skills in interpreting research, in conducting their own systematic studies of workplace issues, and in arguing a case for change;
- builds an awareness of the ways in which HRM needs to adapt across the diverse contexts of today’s industries, economies, societies and cultures; and
- helps develop a common set of professional competencies for the HR practitioner.
On this basis, we think higher education in HRM is important, but let’s be clear that education is only one part of what makes people effective in HR roles. It is also vital to accumulate interesting and powerful experience, a process that stretches our skills and develops us personally. Experience increases our credibility and professional recognition, and qualifies us for greater challenges.
Academic qualifications are important for our development but they do not substitute for experience. Academic qualifications, practical experience and personal development should be seen as the building blocks of a professional career.
Having issued this important ‘product warning’, what can higher education do for the aspiring or current HR professional?
Aspiring HR specialists
Let’s start with the aspiring. Our view is that young people without prior work experience who think they want to become HR specialists need a broadly-based grounding. In effect, we start from two basic assumptions:
· there is no guarantee that a 21-year old HR graduate will get offered an HR specialist job; and
· there is no guarantee that in five years’ time they will still enjoy HR work, if they do get an HR role.
The interests of people at this stage are still evolving and their awareness of ‘what’s actually out there’ is necessarily limited. It is therefore much safer if undergraduate students wanting to get into specialist HR work take at least a double major in their bachelor’s degree or do so through a conjoint degree.
Those doing a business degree should team their HRM or management major with a subject in which they are more likely to gain entry-level employment. Good subjects to combine with HRM include accounting, marketing, information systems, and operations management.
Students who take double majors in business degrees have better exposure to what life is like in organisations outside HR roles. They are more likely to gain an entry-level position and have more options for career development.
Switching across business functions is commonplace among people in their late twenties and early thirties. Those with a broadly based undergraduate education are naturally better prepared for this possibility.
Social science and the postgraduate edge
Alternatively, it can be very valuable to combine a major in HRM with Psychology or another social science, such as Sociology, Politics or Economics, particularly if the student goes on to postgraduate study. We routinely encourage students to take social sciences alongside business studies because of the diverse theoretical perspectives and rigorous research training that the established social sciences provide.
Our view is that an honours or master’s degree in Industrial/Organisational Psychology, in HRM, or in a blend of these two fields provides the most disciplined and relevant academic grounding for contemporary HR work.
People who develop excellent research skills in this kind of postgraduate programme have an edge over undergraduates in the HR labour market. Our experience is that the top HR postgraduate students, particularly those who have done a thesis based on strong fieldwork, have an edge in applying for HR roles in blue-chip firms and international consultancies.
Experienced HR specialists and line managers
So much for the aspiring. What about the experienced HR specialist or line manager seeking an HR qualification? Here we must make quite different assumptions because these practitioner students:
- hold an HR or management job which they have reached through relevant work experience;
- have a much clearer idea about how they want to develop their career based on their personal learning; and
- seek a much more focused and applied form of HR education.
With the growth of mass higher education over the last 20 years, practitioner students of HRM are very nearly all graduates in something. A common pattern is that they have a degree in arts or science but no commercially-grounded HR education.
Practitioner HR students have either gravitated to the area out of a growing natural interest in the function or because their company has seen their people skills and asked them to rotate into the HR Department or start an HR function from scratch.
Some are HR advisors who need HR education to enhance the credibility of their advice. Some want to apply for HR manager or director jobs in which they will need to lead a team of diverse HR specialists whose work they need to understand.
Others are specialist consultants, for example recruitment consultants, who have used the recruitment industry as a way to get a start in the HR field, and who now want to win an HR generalist job in a company. Yet others are seasoned practitioners who want to update their knowledge of current HR research.
These students, then, have the incomparable asset of experience, the touchstone against which they can test the academic knowledge and arguments that come their way. In our view, they should be taught in a practitioner cohort where this experience can be used to best effect and where study is combined with their ongoing work roles.
Their experience gives them a much better context for understanding and evaluating HR theory than can ever be true for pre-experience students. It makes teaching them a much more interactive process. It means we can take an explicit focus on applied HR issues, both at operational and strategic levels. It means their assignments can be tailored to the specific challenges they are facing, around questions which they see as relevant and motivating.
Conclusion: no single model of HR education
This Cook’s tour of HR education should make it readily apparent that there can be no single model of HR education. We need to adapt HR education to the life and work experience of the student concerned.
For those without work experience, the educational model should be more broadly based and encourage intellectual versatility. Exclusive specialisation in a narrow tunnel of HR courses in a bachelor’s degree is a short-sighted model. A more broadly based undergraduate programme is much more likely to lead to initial employment and will lay a better basis for personal growth.
Study of social science in combination with HR courses should be encouraged wherever possible. Top students who add a postgraduate programme, with a challenging fieldwork component, to this broader base often attract the best job offers.
The model has to be different for practitioners. Practitioner students nowadays typically have at least one degree behind them and seek a more focused HR programme which they can combine with their ongoing work life. To be effective, their programme of HR education must build on their experience, using applied assignments that relate theory to practice and enhance their professional development.