Why to choose a career in hr?

Answer 1

The love/hate view of HR departments and professionals is not a novel concept. We used to be part of the "Administration," some paper shufflers who color-coded a variety of filing folders and brought no real creativity or strategy to the process. Corporations, on the other hand, used one-liners such as "our people make the difference" as sound-bite slogans that had little to do with their internal realities. Nowadays, the HR department is the place where recruiting strategies are being discussed, where Mergers and Acquisitions initiatives are being strategized, where the corporate culture is being evaluated and finessed, and where mass reductions-in-force, penetrations of foreign markets, and employment legalities are being assessed.

My decision to join the HR field was not an accident or a Plan B. I still have in my possession the first Human Resources Management textbook I studied during my first semester at the university, while pursuing my business degree. It was the most underlined, noted, questioned, and essayed upon textbook from my undergraduate school years. Moreover, it was, in my case, the beginning of what was an increasingly inquisitive career in human resources, from an Assistant position to the later, always hands-on, management positions.

There is little routine in the human resources work. There is always new employment legislation that needs to be studied, there are always changes in industries that one has to learn and needs to adapt to, there are always jobs evolving and professionals evolving with them, needing appropriate professional counseling. In order to succeed in HR, one has to have a real interest in other people's careers and their development and to commit to the core culture of an organization and work on improving that continuously. It's not necessarily an intuitive kind of work, and people who claim that they are in HR because they "love people" are in the field, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons. It is the kind of work that requires one to perfect thought processes, to keep abreast of new events and developments in the workforce, and to challenge intellectual assumptions about human psyche.

I guess this is actually the very summation of "why HR, anyway" in my case: the thrill of everyday encounters in my line of work with reinventions of otherwise comfortable beliefs regarding human psyche in the work context. Questions such as why this reaction to this announcement, why apathy when there is so much potential, why such reticence to team spirit or individual contribution, why such enthusiasm in spite of many obstacles during this project, etc., make every single day of my work life simply fulfilling, and those, in my opinion, are sublimely valid reasons for me to love what I do and to appreciate the HR work for its worth.

Andreea Boier-Jennings: abj_career@Yahoo.com