This unit focuses on the work and working life of the HRD professional.
It discusses key issues facing the HRD professional today.
Starting with a consideration of roles and the organisation of HRD work, the unit explores the development of the HRD profession and the challenges of work in contemporary organisations.
Specifically, you will explore the importance of managing stakeholder and other professional relationships, working with consultant or working as a consultant yourself, securing funding for HRD activity, and the increasing relevance of ethics and diversity to HRD practice.
As you work through this unit, you will often be asked to reflect on a particular topic (such as networking) in terms of both your own development and how this might relate to the broader practice of HRD within an organisational context (for example, to what extent can the development of networking skills and opportunities be incorporated within HRD approaches?).
You will find that this dual emphasis appears in different topics and is particularly pertinent in the later discussions of ethics and diversity.
In the first four units of this module you have explored key concepts related to HRD practice and examined how these are implemented in contemporary organisations.
Specifically, you considered the theoretical underpinnings of HRD practice (Unit 2), explored different dimensions of HRD strategy (Unit 3) and examined how to plan and implement a range of HRD interventions (Unit 4).
A common theme running through these units is the complex and multifaceted nature of HRD.
It will not come as a surprise, therefore, that the nature of HRD practice and the roles fulfilled by HRD professionals are equally complex and multifaceted.
This unit unpacks important issues faced by HRD professionals as they carry out their work.
5.1 What do HRD professionals do?
The CIPD offers a definition of the HRD profession as consisting of those who ‘build individual and organisational capability and knowledge to meet current and strategic requirements and create a learning culture to embed capability development’ (CIPD, 2013, p. 2).
While there is general agreement as to this overall goal, how this might be delivered by those working in HRD varies enormously.
Professionalism in human resource management (HRM) can be described as a process of becoming an ‘organised occupation’ (this was discussed as part of the broader work of HRM in B863 The human resource professional).
However, it is recognised that the HRD profession faces two particular challenges in achieving this status.
First, ‘HRD activity has traditionally been classified under the headings of training, development and/or education… However, sophisticated HRD strategies extend well beyond these activities’ (Turner and El-Sawad, 2006, p. 318). Second, many other groups (such as organisational psychologists and coaches) have established a foothold in the HRD arena and can therefore stake a professional claim to HRD work.
Second, many other groups (such as organisational psychologists and coaches) have established a foothold in the HRD arena and can therefore stake a professional claim to HRD work.
The variety of those working in the field is recognised by the CIPD, which offers a definition of the HRD professional and defines the areas of learning and development, talent management and organisational development as areas of HRD practice (see Box 5.1).
Box 5.1: The diverse roles of HR professionals.
You could be working for a company or organisation in any sector, in any industry in an L&D role such as trainer, L&D Manager, Head of L&D, talent manager, training administrator or co-ordinator, learning consultant, Head of Organisation Development.
You might work in the wider HR function or team or you might be part of a separate function for learning.
Or you could be working as an associate or independent consultant… working with a number of companies and organisations on a regular basis.
Your responsibilities and capabilities are diverse too spotting, managing and developing talent; making sure individuals, teams and organisations have the right capabilities for their own success so they achieve the organisation’s goals; career management and advice; coaching and mentoring; leadership development; induction training; developing learning solutions with external suppliers, to name but a few.
(Adapted from CIPD, 2013, p. 1)
In this challenging and diverse context, commentators suggest that a real test for HRD professionals is to be perceived as credible experts (Watson, 2010).
This was explored by Pritchard and Fear (2015) in their research into HRD practitioners’ credibility, which you considered in Unit 3. (You may like to revisit your notes or re-read the section on ‘HR professionals and their expertise’ in ‘Credibility lost: attempting to reclaim an expert identity in an HR professional context’ (Pritchard and Fear, 2015), which is also available in your printed Reader.
This is an optional activity.) Pritchard and Fear (2015) highlight the challenges facing HRD practitioners seeking to establish their own expert, professional identity within an HR department, while also touching on the issues that pertain to managing and maintaining their credibility with other stakeholders, an issue you will return to later.
The next activity explores the historical development and changing nature of the HRD profession in the UK. In the second part of the activity you will have the opportunity to review international differences in HRD roles.
Reading 8:
The historical development of human resource development in the United Kingdom.
Activity 5.1:
The changing nature of the HRD profession
5.2 Contemporary challenges for HRD professionals at work
As you have explored above, there is a vast array of work that might be described as HRD. The focus in this section is in examining the changing ways in which HRD work might be organised and the challenges this poses for HRD professionals.
In Unit 3 you examined Mayo’s (2004) categorisation of HRD practice along these dimensions:
• Strategic vs. operational
• Proactive vs. reactive.
However, there are many other factors that impact HRD roles and how HRD work is organised. These factors are discussed individually below but you should be aware that these are closely interrelated and difficult to separate in practice.
Learning philosophy
Across the module you have explored changing approaches to learning in contemporary organisations, particularly a move to less directive and more learner-centred approaches.
In some organisations, the role of the HRD professional role is becoming one of facilitation rather than direction.
A related issue can be that HRD professionals have less control over the way in which learning takes place as responsibility may migrate to line managers.
It is also the case that a facilitation role might apply only to certain groups of employees and for certain types of learning, with an organisational expectation that a more directive role will be adopted for mission critical or regulatory requirements.
Thus the tension between facilitation and directive roles might be felt directly by individual HRD practitioners.
Managing HRD work
Alongside the discussion of HRD roles and the alignment of HR business partners to business areas, there has been further discussion of who should ‘own’ HRD activity (Pritchard and Fear, 2015).
Related to the role of line managers highlighted above, this might be evident in the reporting lines of HRD practitioners working within an organisation and in control of HRD budgets.
This question of who pays for HRD activity is particularly significant. It will impact the way in which HRD activity might be sourced from outside as well as inside an organisation. (We will discuss the use of internal and external consultants later.)
Who pays for HRD will also determine how the expenditure is seen in relation to other budgetary categories.
So, for example, if the HRD budget is managed centrally as part of an overall HR budget, HRD practitioners will need to make a case for HRD expenditure against areas such as performance management.
However, if the HRD budget is held and controlled by a business area, HRD practitioners may have to campaign alongside different operational agendas to secure funding.
This highlights why contemporary HRD practice has been called a political activity by some commentators (Swart et al., 2012).
Temporal considerations
Whether it is the time taken to fulfil a customer service request or the period over which return on investment is expected, it is suggested that there is increasing time pressure at work (Wajcman, 2015).
HRD professionals are increasingly required to respond quickly to perceived issues and also to develop ‘time-effective’ learning and development solutions.
HRD work might also be impacted by temporal cycles within an organisation.
These might be associated with a regular calendar of events such as a performance management process or an annual budgeting cycle.
Other considerations may arise from seasonal influences or other peaks and troughs within a particular business context that impact the demand for HRD resources.
Spatial organisation
Traditionally, employees came to a single place of work on a daily basis, yet this trend is changing and a wider range of work patterns are emerging.
These include distributed, virtual, mobile and teleworking (Wageman et al., 2012). For example, virtual teams might offer a number of benefits over co-located (or face-to-face) teams, such as greater access to expertise or creativity, greater round-the-clock service to customers, faster response to global market demands, saving of travel costs and increased flexibility for employees.
However, research has also shown that working in virtual teams can be more problematic, as there is often increased conflict and reduced trust as a result of reduced face-to-face interaction (Kirkman et al., 2004).
Add into the mix the increasing internationalisation of many work environments -including HR and HRD - and the picture becomes more complex still.
The spatial organisation of HRD work impacts the ways in which HRD practitioners work with each other, other HR professionals and stakeholders.
It is also relevant to practitioners’ understanding of the different spaces that employees occupy and the impact of this on their engagement with HRD activities.
Diversity of HRD professionals and practice
HRD practitioners often find themselves working in diverse teams. In such teams different individuals bring to the process their own values, beliefs, expertise, characteristics and objectives, which in turn determine the nature of team dynamics.
The more diverse such values, beliefs and objectives, the more complex the dynamics or interactions and the greater the likelihood of conflict.
However, such dynamics can also be the catalyst for effective performance.
Cultural diversity can also have both positive and negative effects, as members from different cultural backgrounds will not share the same interpretation of events and may not act or perceive situations in similar ways (Hofstede and Hofstede, 2001).
However, culturally diverse groups have the advantage of sharing a wider range of experiences and resources and may therefore be able to develop more creative and novel solutions in problem-solving tasks.
As the number of international and multinational organisations increases, the importance of the impact of culture must also be considered when establishing cross-national work teams so that potential conflicts are effectively managed (Nielsen and Nielsen, 2013).