How to nurture the next generation HR professional

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

RIL shares rises to 1-month highCITU, INTTUC workers clash near HPL projectRIL submits bid for LyondellBasell

: The last decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in employment within the organised and semi-organised sectors in India. Most of this employment-generation is happening in people-intensive sectors.

This has led to a dramatic increase in the requirements for human resource professionals. While it is true that the global economic downturn may considerably affect this projection, at a very conservative estimate we are looking at adding at least five million new jobs over the next five years and even if one were to go by the not-so-healthy ratio of one HR professional for every 500 employees, we need at least 10,000 HR professionals for this period.

The truth is that specialised HR MBAs would not be able to meet even a fifth of this requirement if we were to consider the total output of some of the good institutes in India, as from this pool one can disregard 20% from the start as they usually join HR consulting firms. Even combining the next tiers of business schools these projections paint a dismal demand-supply situation at the entry level. The story is no different at other levels. While a few large organisations have focused on improving capabilities of their HR organisations, most of the organisations haven’t yet made any significant efforts in this direction and a lot of people employed at this level are without any formal HR qualification. Therefore, there is a crying need to address and improve the overall human resource competencies of HR professionals across levels in most of the organisations.

While many educational institutes are enhancing their intakes in terms of numbers, it will take them years to meet the growing requirement. Herein lies the need for scaling up the availability of quality HR professionals through alternate routes which will manifest quality in the profession across levels.

Next, let’s define what we mean by quality HR professionals. The accompanying figure demonstrates the HR Competency Model developed which consists of 17 competencies classified under four categories.

This classification looks at competencies on two dimensions: those that are critical to a function as against those that are critical for managers in general, and those that are technical knowledge and skill related as against those that are behavioral dimensions. Thus we have four buckets of competencies in the model. Out of the 17, nine are functional-technical/skill competencies and three are functional behavioural competencies. The remaining five consist of three generic behavioural and two generic technical competencies.