The evolution of a career in HR

- Step into the world of human resources, where every task contributes to the growth of a company. Those at the beginning of an HR career tend to be focused on compliance and administrative duties. You have to have someone fill out I-9s, manage open enrollment, and stay on top of the policy handbook. If you're new to HR, you're probably doing more admin work, not discussing how to maximize the company's talent. It's an important phase of your career in HR. What I'd like to offer you is a look at how your career will typically evolve. Check out the HR Maturity Model in the Exercise Files as we go through the four phases of an HR career. I call the first phase administrative HR, where you're more focused on servicing needs as they arise. At this stage, people are focused on writing job descriptions, posting ads in online job boards like LinkedIn, conducting reference checks, ensuring new hires fill out the required paperwork, interacting with the benefits broker during open enrollment, and locating training vendors. The second phase of an HR career is what I call solution-focused HR. As you gain the trust of leaders, you start to be seen as someone who can problem-solve. You're also becoming interested in HR best practices. Managers might come to you about how to handle an employee performance issue. Your job postings have improved as you seek better and more diverse talent for your candidate pool. You start trying to understand why that one department has higher turnover than others. Essentially, you're starting to understand that HR can really contribute to the organization's success. From there, the third phase is strategic HR, where you're aligning with business needs and seeing employees as assets. In this stage, you're doing workforce surveys, wanting managers to motivate and reward people for good work, building strategic plans for recruiting and employer branding, implementing and measuring actions that reduce turnover, creating total compensation packages, and developing leadership programs for high performers. Towards the end of your HR career, you'll likely have moved into the fourth phase, integrated HR. You are seen as a key partner to leaders, and you're driving decisions with data and counsel. You're figuring out how to capture and measure everything so you can provide great advice to leaders. You're locating gaps that hinder organizational growth and solving them. Your onboarding program is on point and you're using core competencies to drive bonuses. Now, sometimes people get excited about a specialty, and instead of growing through HR, they grow into experts within a specific niche. Some examples include recruitment and talent acquisition, where you're focused on sourcing, hiring, and onboarding, or employee relations, where you're building positive relationships between the employees and employer, taking grievances, and handling disciplinary actions. There's also labor relations, which is managing relationships with labor unions and negotiating collective bargaining agreements, compensation and benefits, where you're designing and administering compensation structures, including salaries, bonuses, and benefits packages, and even learning and development, which is all about identifying training needs, designing training programs, and facilitating employee development initiatives. I put a list of 15 specialties to choose from in the Exercise Files, so I encourage you to check it out. You can learn more about things like HR technology, analytics and metrics, organizational development, and more. If you're early in your career, take a look to see what strikes you.