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Well-established
institutes like XLRI Jamshedpur, TISS, SCMHRD and MDI Gurgaon are doing
a wonderful service to this discipline, the professors from these
institutes have been taking up guest lectures at a gamut of other Indian
B-schools thereby contributing to the overall development of the HR
domain.
The third point is
regarding the perception of HR as a "common sense" discipline not worth
specializing in. In essence, HR incorporates within itself numerous
other disciplines. Let us take the example of a recruitment process as
an HR activity; you have been entrusted with the job of hiring employees
for your firm, which means you are choosing the future workforce of your
firm. You need to make sure that they fit the desired profile, you need
to make sure that they would stick around with your firm, you need to
access their adaptability to a team set-up, you need to gauge their
communication skills (I am not referring to their talk alone), you need
to judge the potential of leadership in the person, and to add to all
this, you need to pick the best from a nebulous mix of individuals after
having compared them carefully.
If you go through the
list of above-mentioned activities, you will understand that you need to
have knowledge that is vast, you need to know relevant bits of
psychology, sociology, leadership, body language, communication styles,
teamwork, and to some extent, technology (this may vary depending on
your role). Each of these is a huge body of knowledge by itself; HR
combines all these disciplines in order to become a virtually
all-encompassing field. I have not mentioned here other numerous
processes that come under its purview, like conflict resolution, diverse
workforce handling, employee compensation design, etc. Do you still
think of it as a common sense field?
Now I come to the
final point, which I want to address. Marketing is associated with
glamour and limelight, Finance is related to power and such link-ups go
on and on. What do you link HR with? HR people are hardly seen at
product launches, they do not get photographed with actresses, they are
not seen when a company uses the media to announce its profits and
growth, and you have not heard about companies fussing over them.
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