Industry

As with anything else in life, developing a career in HR has its ups and downs. As stated earlier, it is a challenging and exciting career path in which directly or indirectly you will be in constant contact with people. If you ask any HR professional, he will likely agree that the most rewarding aspects of pursuing a career in HR involve making a great impact on the business organization you work for, or in somebody else’s life.

Either through helping the company save money on health costs, or by offering a vacant position to a worthy candidate, or even providing an employee with a raise, the responsibility of working in HR provides daily challenges with rewarding outcomes.

The attraction of knowing that you will interact with employees from different areas, and the opportunity to focus on different projects on an almost daily basis is also implicit. This gives you the chance to develop an in-depth knowledge of the organization and put into practice everything you have read in books or studied at college.

But working in HR also implies some negative, less attractive aspects. To begin with, you may be in charge of informing a staff member that he or she will no longer belong to the company. You may also be responsible for dealing with stressful situations, helping employees cope with a difficult time in the organization and undertaking plenty of administrative work even if you are not in charge of the payroll system.

There are multiple roles and abilities that you will develop and become accustomed to as an HR professional. The most common are focused within HR recruiting and staffing, training and learning, compensations and benefits, organization development and employee development. Most professionals develop specific skills and concentrate on one area in particular; others prefer a more general approach.

Recruiting and staffing implies working with the area of the company where a new candidate is needed, writing a job description and establishing the skills, academic and professional background, and personality profile that are the most suitable for filling the vacant position.

As a recruiter, you will be in charge of finding the most appropriate candidates. As a staffer you will concentrate on making sure that each employee is in the right position so that the company can grow successfully. As a training professional, you will work with new and old employees helping them to learn fresh skills or to get acquainted with the organization. You will assume the role of a teacher, a business partner and a leader, and your efforts will enable employees to be more productive, and grow as professionals within and outside the company as well.

You may be asked to deliver the training courses yourself, or hire somebody else to do so. The area of compensations and benefits is one of the most crucial aspects in any business organization: it ensures that all staff members are fairly compensated for their responsibilities and tasks within the company. If your expertise is in compensation, you will focus on monetary and remunerative matters, but if your expertise is in benefits your focus will be placed on ensuring that employees are well taken care of.

Pursuing a career in HR in the Labor and Employee Relations area mainly involves ensuring that employee rights, contracts, responsibilities or complaints are dealt with in a prompt manner. It also requires an acquaintance with labor laws and regulations, and support in the resolution of conflicts. One of the latest areas to have been established in HR is organizational development.

Its main objective is studying a given company’s growth, and identifying areas to be improved so that the organization grows in a healthy manner. Amongst the various tasks involved are: restructuring the chain of command, introducing a new technical system in a certain department or area, or reviewing the performance of employees.