HR pioneers' long road to certification - Human Resource Certification Institute

HR Magazine, Nov, 1993 by David J. Cherrington, Bill Leonard

The program that grew to become the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI) celebrates its 20th birthday in the fall of 1993. Here are the highlights of that important professional journey.

In September 1973, the board of directors for the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA) approved the recommendations of a specially appointed taskforce to create a certification program for human resource professionals. Building a national certification body for HR professionals would generate esteem and recognition for both the profession and ASPA, now the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

It was a daunting task.

The journey toward certifying HR professionals began more than 50 years ago. In the 1930s, academicians and personnel practitioners began debates on whether or not personnel management should be considered a profession. One of the early articles on the issue was "Professional Consciousness in Management" (Advanced Management, July 1938). Interest in personnel management as a profession intensified after World War II. Articles such as "The Profession of Personnel Administration" (Personnel Journal, January 1946), and "Should Industrial Relations Men Be Given Professional Status?" (Industrial Relations, December 1946), fueled the debate.

In its June 1948 issue, Personnel Journal announced a contest for the best description of a personnel association. In the same magazine, Dale Yoder, Ph.D., a professor of industrial relations at the University of Minnesota, discussed the characteristics of a profession and the ways that personnel management fit those characteristics.

Both Yoder and his colleague at Minnesota, Herbert Heneman Jr., Ph.D., had earned reputations for being national leaders in personnel management. Today, Yoder and Heneman (both deceased) are recognized as the two most influential figures in establishing human resource management as a profession.

In the fall of 1948, Heneman published the article, "Qualifying the Professional Industrial Relations Worker." He wrote about the need for certifying personnel managers. He said only two steps were needed to start a certification program:

* A code of ethics.

* An objective measure of technical competence.

The idea of an objective measure of competence injected three interesting dilemmas into the debate over the professional nature of HR management:

* What body of knowledge must personnel professionals know?

* Who defines the body of knowledge?

* How do you objectively measure it?

Heneman's article had optimistically oversimplified the problem. It would take more than 25 years to answer these questions.

Birth of a society

The American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA) was founded in November 1948 (ASPA was renamed the Society for Human Resource Management |SHRM~ in September 1989). ASPA was formed after a scandal rocked the National Association of Personnel Directors (NAPD) to its core. The Chicago-based NAPD, founded in the early '40s and recognized as the national personnel management organization, was dissolved after it was revealed that the NAPD executive director was a convicted forger and that he had a questionable relationship with the association's secretary/treasurer.

ASPA's founding members established its headquarters in the Cleveland suburb of Berea, Ohio. In those early years, ASPA struggled to earn national recognition and to build its professional image.

The ASPA founders agreed that a certification program was essential to the profession. But the fledgling nature of ASPA and debates over personnel management's body of knowledge put work toward a certification program on hold. It took 19 years before any concrete steps toward certification were made.

In the fall of 1967, ASPA and the Cornell University School of Industrial Relations co-sponsored a three-day conference to discuss defining the profession and its common body of knowledge. The conference generated some interesting and, at times, intense debates.

"We parted as friends, in some cases just barely, and I for one considered accreditation to be a dead issue," wrote Wiley Beavers, in an article in the November 1975 issue of Personnel Administrator (now HRMagazine). Beavers (now deceased) served as the 1967 president of ASPA.

Other participants viewed the Cornell conference as an important stepping stone toward the certification program. Drew Young, who served as the 1970 president of ASPA, attended the conference and assesses the meeting differently. "We had some debates at that conference. Yes, they were a little intense at times, but that's all they were, just debates. Wiley was always a little prone to exaggeration," Young says with a laugh. "I think Wiley was trying to drive home the point in his article that we felt strongly about the issue."

Young never believed that accreditation was a dead issue; he was always confident that the question would be resolved.

"Our biggest problem was the overwhelming size of the task. There was a sense of cooperation and that we were working together. The question we really wanted to resolve at that conference was, 'Is this a profession or an occupation?'" Young said.