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Developing IT Skills and Financial Skills for a Career in HR

Laura

Hi there,

I'm working towards an assignment for my MSc HRM course that involves creating a development plan for the skills needed to progress to be a Human Resources Business Partner when I graduate.

I have identified the following skill sets as areas of weakness:

Skill set 5 - Interpret financial information and manage financial resources

Structure, content and interpretation of simple balance sheets, profit and loss accounts and trading statements; ratio analysis; basic costing concepts and techniques; cash flow and cash budgets; budgetary planning and control.

Skill set 6 - IT proficiency

Information-handling skills, commonly used IT applications and software packages, statistical techniques and the presentation of statistical data.

Can anyone give me some advice about what the most important IT skills and skills for interpreting and managing financial resources needed for a career in HR might be?

Suggestions about effective ways to advance these skills, e.g. LinkedIn Learning courses, specific workshops to attend or books to read, would also be appreciated!

Many thanks,

Laura

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  • Hi Laura, and welcome to the Communities

    In my career, I have had three main needs for understanding financial information: understanding the management accounts (a monthly or quarterly profit and loss or P&L) and thus the performance of the business, understanding budgeting and costing new projects.

    There are a lot of short courses on finance for non-financial managers but I’d start by getting someone to talk you through the monthly management accounts. You need to understand the terminology, e.g. the difference between gross and nett profit, what is depreciation etc. This allows you to track how the business is performing against the budget.

    Probably the easiest way to learn how to put a budget together is to see if you can sit in as you get towards the end of the current financial year for your organisation and observe the process. The same applies for costing a new project but the technique you could learn in advance is how to calculate a break-even point. If you have already gained some familiarity with the accounts and budget so that you can analyse the effect of a new initiative in terms of those, then that might be all you need. If you are involved in costing a new commercial initiative, then calculating or understanding a break-even point is also going to be essential.

    For IT, we don’t need particularly high-level skills. Using Excel to work with salaries is one essential: calculating the effect of a pay increase is a frequently needed skill but this year we have also had to use Excel to calculate the effect of putting people on furlough. Sadly, HR people have also needed to use Excel to calculate the redundancy costs this year. This is a bit more complicated than applying an across the board percentage increase as there is a cap to apply to the value of a week’s pay and you also need to separate out how many complete years of service people have at different ages (up to 41 etc).

    The other package I find I need increasingly is PowerPoint. We all know it as a package for producing presentations but I find PowerPoint is now often used to create documents where once I would have used Word. It imposes a discipline of brevity.
  • in reply to Elizabeth Divver
    Thank you so much for this Elizabeth - all of this information is incredibly useful and I'll definitely set to work developing my knowledge and skills in these areas!
  • in reply to Steve Bridger
    Thank you, Steve - it's lovely to be a part of the Community!
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