Are HR management courses preparing students to be the people strategy stars of the future?

17/02/12 | 0 comments

This article originally appeared in HR Magazine by Mary Carmichael. To read in full click here.

An understanding of finance, sales, marketing, ethics, operations, planning and people, plus a smattering of entrepreneurship and the ability to walk on water – this is the job description of many of today’s CEOs.

OK, the last one is a slight exaggeration, but the rest make up a pretty accurate description of the skills and knowledge an HRD – or any other senior director, for that matter – would have to accumulate to merit the top job. It is a tough challenge and those who aim that high boost their chances by starting to garner the necessary skills and experience well in advance.

"To progress to board level and be successful, senior HR leaders must have a strong commercial focus to be able to add value to a business," says Gareth Smith, senior business manager at global recruitment firm, Hays HR. "Getting more aware of business will help HRDs become more skilled at selling the benefits of the HR function, clever ways of measuring ROI and benefits, for example – 'we have improved engagement, so attrition is down' – and so on. In the past, they might have struggled to do this, but now HRDs are much more savvy about how they represent themselves and HR."

Studying is one way to get the savvy. According to university comparison site, hotcourses.com, there are 747 institutions in the UK offering HR management courses, and whatuni.com records 149 universities offering postgraduate HR courses.

But are these institutions doing enough to prepare students hoping to work in the field of people management to be the 'brightest and the best' for the world of strategic business? Smith says he has seen a definite shift in HR graduates' understanding of the necessity of adding wider business experience to academic achievements to progress their careers: "I look at interim HRDs at senior level and, typically, they have a strong mix of business acumen and HR," he says.

"People are coming out of university or business school with an HR qualification and they know they need to gain experience. They are bringing more to the table."

Amy Campbell, HR advisor at B&Q, is typical of this new breed. She has just completed the human resource management and development MA at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, in a concerted effort to get broad management insight and to cover areas such as finance and business strategy.

"I feel I can now go confidently into organisations and know what I am talking about," she says. "I have got wider knowledge and know where HR sits in an organisation and where it can add value. I now want to get the opportunities to put it into practice."

While Campbell is still a few years away from aiming for board level, those who have made it have got additional business expertise. Some have taken on, by design or accident, roles that have exposed them to different functions and viewpoints – sometimes being fast-tracked by far-sighted companies on a deliberate multi-functional career course.

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