People Management, or popularly known as HR, as a job profile gives wings to millions of skillful young professionals across the world to take off in their careers each year. A career choice that offers a robust job market, a huge growth opportunity, diversified challenges, and most importantly, an opportunity to help people grow and rise in their respective careers.
Human Resources specialist was ranked No. 15 on the list of the best business jobs in the US in 2014 as per a report submitted by the “U.S. News & World”. Further, HR as a field of profession ranked 71 in the 100 best jobs in general in the same report.
And if the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) is to be believed, job growth for HR specialists will continue at 7% till 2022.
For HR managers, the growth opportunities are even brighter, a whopping 13% employment surge is expected that will sustain by 2022.
What’s In There For You?
• The profile will allow you to contribute to the growth of a business, as you will be overseeing critical business functions such as hiring, training, strategically defining compensation and benefits for varied job roles, etc.
• You will converse with the top management in an organization almost every single day regarding strategic planning, carving the path for business direction, and employee learning & development.
• You will naturally become good at communicating with, and managing people coming from varied backgrounds, at different career stages, and possessing unique skillsets.
• You will develop life-skills while on the job, e.g. patience, negotiation, the power of listening, detailing in work, and professionalism.
3 Major Boons Attached with a Career in Human Resources (HR)
• Non-Monotonous Work: In HR, there is no typical day at work. You meet new people each day and strike a meaningful conversation. Added to that, you carry out diverse tasks ranging from managing a booth at a job fair to providing training to hires.
• Challenging: HR as a profession is evolving at a rapid pace with new technologies and HR management portals emerging every now and then. Besides, modern-day hiring strategies are scientific forcing one to evaluate a candidate basis multiple metrics while hiring.
• People in HR often get involved in strategic long-term business planning, and thus, gain immense knowledge about the functioning of organizations.
HR – The Career Trajectory
As an HR professional, one can make his career under one of the two major generalizations in the work domain:
- HR Generalist: In this role, one performs a diverse array of duties. These comprise hiring, recruiting, remuneration planning, training and development, and defining companies’ HR policies.
The other responsibilities under this section of career development in HR include ensuring that the company is conforming to all the applicable state, federal, and local labor laws.
Job titles that fall under the category HR Generalists are:
• HR Assistant
• HR Manager
• Chief HR Officer
2. HR Specialist: They generally work in big companies having considerable employee strength. In comparison to their counterparts, they are more proficient in technical skills within a specific area in HR management. These specialized knowledge areas comprise HR development, workforce planning, employee and labor relations, rewards, risk management, etc.
Job titles held by HR specialists are:
• Compensation Specialist
• Retention specialist
• Risk Management Specialist
• Recruiter
• Labour Relations Manager
• Benefits Analyst
• Safety Officer
• Trainer
How to Transition to HR from a Different Field
One can easily transition from a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds to HR, provided that he/she is ready to learn. There exist a plethora of professional HR certifications that can help an individual smoothly transition to making a career in HR.
Today, you can pick up an e-learning HR Course that can prepare and train you comprehensively to start your career in the said work domain.
Professional & Educational Backgrounds That Easily Merge with HR
Administration, teaching, lawyers, business development are some of the job profiles that seamlessly transition into HR.
In terms of fields of study, having an academic degree in sociology, business, and psychology would certainly prove to be a catalyst in the process of entering into recruiting and people management.