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10 Things i learned from working in HR

Views 12 Views    Comments 0 Comments    Share Share    Posted 01-02-2009  
Are you thinking about a career in HR? Are you a line manager considering giving HR a try? Or, how about a training or OD specialist, considering a cross-functional developmental assignment as an HR generalist?

A while back, when I was a training director at a large multinational, that’s exactly what I did. I was advised that if I wanted to be considered for a VP position, I’d have a better chance if I ventured outside the corporate ivory tower and took a development assignment as an HR generalist out on the front lines. After all, there was only one training and development VP job, but over a dozen HR VP jobs. The same seemed to be true on the Monster and Yahoo job boards – about a 5 to 1 ratio.

The thinking was that even if I came back to OD/training & development, I’d be a stronger specialist, having gained valuable cross-functional experience.

At first I was skeptical. For one thing, although I never worked in a pure HR role, I had a good amount of exposure, and didn’t like what I saw. It just didn’t seem like a good fit for me. And what about my lack of HR experience? “Don’t worry about that”, I was told by my advisers. “You’ve got all of the important, transferable competencies; you can learn the technical parts” (that bit of advice from a VP that had a staff of minions to do the technical parts for her).

So I said “what the hell”, and gave it a shot. For eighteen very long, painful months. I survived – barely. It turned out to be one of the most developmental experiences of my career. Here are the lessons I learned:

1. The importance of Excel – and Access, and pivot tables. For my entire career, I had somehow managed to achieve success without having to learn Excel. Most of my work could be achieved with dazzling PowerPoint models and Word documents. I quickly learned that HR generalists need to crunch a LOT of numbers. Performance appraisal correlations, adverse impact analysis, restructuring costs, incentive plan payouts, and a staggering amount of other calculations. And – the numbers actually had to be correct.

2. HR clients expect the right answers – and quickly. There’s little tolerance for “maybe”, “it depends”, or “I’ll get back to you on that”, responses that served me so well in previous roles.

3. Work shifts from a few big projects to one never-ending series of tasks. In most of my roles, I always had 6-12 big projects that I was juggling. Every day you might push 1-2 boulders a few more feet. As an HR generalist, tasks get added to a running to-do list faster than you can cross them off. There’s no such thing as “done” at the end of a day. Some days it felt like the classic “I Love Lucy” chocolate assembly line episode.

Source:
http://www.hrguru.com/news/articles/1981-10-things-i-learned-from-working-in-hr?
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