HR's new breed; Coming to an office near you: HR professionals with wide-ranging business skills and a desire for challenging work

HR Magazine, Jan, 2006 by Robert Rodriguez

Today's up-and-coming HR professionals, those now in undergraduate and graduate programs, are learning things that weren't necessarily part of traditional HR--from finance and operations to statistics and strategy. When these newly minted professionals begin their HR careers, what will they expect--and what can employers expect from them?

These future professionals expect to use the business training they're investing in today. They want challenging jobs, not administrative tasks. They believe that the HR function is increasing in importance and that they can help demonstrate HR's relevance to companies' bottom lines. And bottom lines are familiar to them because many of them have business experience in fields outside HR.

Take Don Miller, for instance.

Miller, who has an undergraduate degree in finance and economics, started his career at one of the top five accounting firms doing financial and litigation consulting--reconciling bankruptcy contracts, to be exact. He had planned to pursue a legal career until a consulting engagement made him aware of just how valuable the HR function can be to the success of a business.

"This consulting assignment really showed me the importance of having the right people in the right place at the right time, and I saw HR as largely responsible for such decisions," Miller says.

An internship in Microsoft's HR organization confirmed his decision to pursue an HR career. Now he is completing his second year in the MBA program at Michigan State University, with a concentration in HR. And while some of his MBA classmates give him a hard time for focusing on HR, Miller is having the last laugh. He says Microsoft has already offered him an HR job.

"I'm choosing a career in HR because I see the function being a huge driver of business success," Miller says. He believes the transition to a knowledge-based economy is already making HR more respected and valued in the workplace because HR can help find the people with the right knowledge.

Miller may have exceptional financial and business credentials, but he is not the exception to the rule. "I think it's already the case that people taking high-level HR jobs are coming from other functional areas where they have a more financial orientation," says Peter Cappelli, professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

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"The function is now attracting people who want to be seen as businesspeople first, HR experts second," adds Lisa Harris, senior vice president of client services at Gevity, an HR service provider based in Bradenton, Fla. "When someone tells me they want to go into HR because they want to help others, I tell them they should go become a social worker."

What They're Learning

Future HR professionals like Miller are studying in a changing academic environment where HR programs emphasize business and financial skills as never before. As a result, tomorrow's HR practitioners are receiving a greater financial orientation, learning to think strategically and developing planning skills.

In fact, these are skills that HR students are demanding. Savvy students will shy away from programs that do not offer solid business and finance courses, says Bill Conaty, senior vice president of corporate HR at Fairfield, Conn.-based General Electric and a member of the advisory board for the Center for Advanced Human Resources Studies at Cornell University.

Miller agrees. When he was deciding where to earn his graduate degree, he was put off by HR programs that lacked courses on data segmentation or financial statement analysis. The absence of such courses was a factor in his decision to pursue an MBA with a concentration in HR, rather than an HR degree.

The preferences of students such as Miller, and employers, are leading to changes at many colleges and universities. Traditionally, academic institutions are "primarily driven by the interests and views of faculty," Cappelli says. "They focus primarily on academic research questions, not practice, and those questions haven't changed much." But professors note that employers and students today, even more than faculty, are driving some changes to academic HR programs--and university administrators are altering curricula accordingly.

Little wonder, then, that today Cappelli sees academic HR programs including more operations research and internal accounting courses. Such skills are needed to help HR professionals demonstrate the business benefits of HR programs, something employers increasingly demand, he notes.

A business and financial perspective also is being emphasized in the HR curriculum at Penn State University. William Rothwell, professor in charge of workforce education and development, says he has added a real-world application focus to HR courses to better prepare students for the demands they will face. For example, instead of focusing on theories about succession planning, Rothwell emphasizes the return on investment of succession planning programs. Such changes appeal to mid-career students who already have experience in business, he says.