HR

Pursuing a career in Human Resources (HR) is not only challenging and demanding, but also extremely rewarding, especially when you consider that you will be working with a business organization’s most precious assets: its employees. There will always be the need for HR professionals in the corporate world, as they perform multiple and varied important tasks. As an HR professional you may spend your days recruiting personnel, helping staff members to understand the policies of the company, and being able to grow within the organization or managing a particular process once an employee leaves the company. In other cases, you may focus your career in HR on undertaking statistical analysis, administering payroll, conducting interviews or giving training courses.

Developing a career in HR became possible in the 1900s, when major changes in the working environment introduced by factories and machines proved the importance of managing and training workers.

Frederick Taylor is considered an HR pioneer, as he was first to discover the importance of managing staff members in order to ensure that the business organization performs accurately. Even though his robotic approach was soon discarded as it focused on the company’s welfare and not on that of employees, it established the groundwork upon which modern HR policies and practices have developed.

Modern HR started in the 1930s in the United States of America when Western Electric hired researchers to study strategies for increasing their workers productivity in one of their plants. This was the beginning of a new HR approach that led managers to make sure that their employees were content, and that they were given the appropriate working conditions, enabling higher productivity and more commitment to the organization. Soon afterwards, the HR field opened up to different positions and specialties, each of them devoted to a certain area of managing personnel.