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In the future in the HR profession, could people get Chartered or Fellow membership based on longevity & not level of experience?

Andre

We all know both the current state of the HR jobs market and how different and difficult it is today compared to this time 20-40 years ago. Very few roles to go around, intense competition for each and every one, and a structural and systemic imbalance in terms that it's quite common nowadays to need the CIPD 7 and a Masters / PhD and the Associate Membership just to get your foothold into the profession and land an entry level role such as an HR Administrator, which 20-40 years ago was more commonly reserved for school or college leavers with just GCSEs and / or A Levels. Over qualification inflation and course devaluation due to excess supply and low demand in a crowded jobs market. If everyone holds a BA degree, it's commonality and lack of scarcity becomes the new GCSE. Technology, automation, robotisation, downsizing, offshoring and management delayering as part of global business process re-engineering trends also play a part here.        

As an analogy, it's very similar in the legal profession that due to the near impossibility of getting a Solicitor training contract or a Barrister pupillage due to the numbers of opportunities and candidates nationwide, many people with the LPC, BVC and MA have to settle to become a Paralegal, Legal Administrator / Assistant, Legal Executive,  Legal Recruitment Consultant or a Legal Secretary, and maybe hope to get it after 10 years+ 

Put another way, your job role title level and formal educational qualification level no longer automatically correspond, match and correlate together. 'Some people' in HR however also manage to do it the other way and get ahead without paper qualifications as they can somehow by hook or crook 'get the experience.'      

However, a more disturbing trend and pattern that I have recently noticed (depending on how you view it or not) is that what technically happens if the presumed 'temporary solution' actually starts to become permanent in nature, and then gradually turns into your actual long term career role and level in terms of yes, you did manage to break into HR and have worked in HR based on having the CIPD 7 et al, but then (for a variety of reasons and circumstances outside of your direct control) if never actually goes any further or deeper than that?   

In short, you start out as an HR Administrator and then subsequently cannot get beyond, above or off that level despite having and holding all the relevant papers? After a decade you are still one.  

Would such a scenario be somehow viewed by the profession as a type of  'partial success'  that yes, you did manage to get into HR, work in HR, hold an HR role and gain HR experience along with the CIPD 7, but you also could not move beyond that point, grade, band and pay scale either?      

If this structural and systemic problem also goes long term, could you see any possible provision built in for people to get the higher levels of CIPD membership based on their long term service in and to the profession, despite of being unable to obtain the higher level job roles in it at the same time?    

Or otherwise, consider them as a type of 'Associate HR professional'? You are not an HR Manager, HR Advisor or an HRBP, but are a long standing, highly experienced, well respected, liked, knowledgeable and expert HR Administrator / HR Assistant.    

In addition, every profession is like a pyramid that most of the jobs are concentrated on the lower levels and the higher you move up, it tends to thin out accordingly with fewer good roles on the top. Police force hierarchies are a clear indicator of this. They mainly need rank and file Police Officers on the ground fighting crime on a daily basis, but do not require hundreds of Inspectors, Commanders or Assistant Chief Constables. 

I would value all your respective comments on this, as I gradually see this as the direction both the overall UK jobs market and HR profession as a whole is gradually moving in. A glut at the bottom in terms of entry level and trainee roles, with only a smaller number of select and hand picked candidates able to move any further up and into it. 

In summary, it may become that an HR Administrator becomes a postgraduate career role, level, pathway and lifelong career in its own right, with even apprentices trained to be one.          

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  • Andre

    I'm afraid I have to add my voice to the criticism of your comments, especially with regard to the implication that HR is some sort of "closed shop" where only the right connections, a funny handshake, or at least fifty grey-hairs to the inch "buy" your way in.

    Unlike law, medicine, accountancy or gas-fitting, we are not a profession requiring "registration" before practicing: Anyone can call themselves an "HR Professional", be they someone fresh out of University dripping with degrees and PGCs, or the lowest pay clerk in the pecking order who is told his/her role is now: "...sorting out the bl**dy workers and their moans and groans", and also including someone fed up with getting £75 a week who thinks they might apply for an HR role at the local sweat-shop, who want someone to "hire and fire". 

    (...and all of whom might be similarly unready to practice HR professionally at any senior level)

    So employers get the HR Practice they want to pay for or seek to manipulate; not that which we as a profession would like to offer them.

    That said, the value of "real" HR Practice has gained in value and credibility over the 30 years or so I have been practicing it (in one form or another) thanks largely to the gaining of our Charter and the efforts of CIPD to make it, at the very least, a structured profession with clear and relevant levels of competence, culminating in Chartered Membership and Fellowship; which are neither time-based nor indeed academic-learning based, but can better be thought of as awarded when the mix of what we know and what we understand, both academically and about people (as people and not just as "employees") give us sufficient insight to earn those accolades.

    That is not to say that there are no legitimate criticisms possible of how CIPD functions, or how it awards qualifications, or indeed why it has not pushed harder (if at all) to require registration (given the damage that incompetent or over-confident HR practice can do to both companies and people), but what is absolutely certain is that the apparent scarcity of higher-level HR jobs is not down to the operation of some clandestine "old boys'/girls' network", but the demand for competence by (responsible) employers of people (and HR professionals) in an increasingly hazardous and litigious employment and business environment.

    Without that "current fluency" of practice built up in more junior or supported roles we are a potential menace!

    To take my own case: After some years of (nominal) retirement, and in spite of keeping up to date with (most) leading progressions in HR (or trying to) I for one would not consider myself anywhere near competent to take on a leading HR role for a company at this time without "stepping down" and coming back up to speed first, in spite of my 14 years as a Chartered Fellow and 24 years membership of (C)IPD, with a whole lot of "HR by any other name" before that! (...and irrespective of the mentoring I still do privately, some of it at very senior level with people in very large businesses, and/or my various submissions and exchanges here in the Community.

    Without rancour: You repeatedly offer your opinions of why you seem to be unsuccessful in obtaining a role at a level you believe you deserve, and why this is due to the Profession: Its "failures" or "secret societies", or systems; seemingly without regard for the realities of the profession we practice, the years that we (all members) have struggled to establish its value and strategic relevance, and the fact that within today's business environment, and in such a complex professional field, "one size" of skill-set does not fit all. So all the academic learning in the world, alone, is not going to fit any HR practitioner for stepping straight into a multi-functional generalist HR role at senior level.

    It is not the profession, or how it functions, or who crosses whose palm with silver, that prevents "simply anyone" from being appointed to senior roles; it is maturity (but not age); running toward the flame instead of away from it; providing workable answers and not just mechanistic systems of control, and remembering to use the words: "thank you" when extra effort is made on your (or the company's) behalf. Whether that be by a member of the Board, or the guy sweeping the car park. (...Or indeed the members trying to provide relevant answers "pro-bono" here). All those things  (and a whole lot more) make up the "fit" for senior roles and eventually Chartered Memberships and Fellowships.

    ...and personally, as probably one of the older contributors on these pages, I find any suggestion that my competence assessed award of Fellowship in 2004 might have been due to my age rather than the damned hard work I put in to turning my experience into my portfolio, frankly insulting.

    ....Which reminds me: H.U.B.S. has still got it! They asked to retain it as an example for others to emulate... Thank you for reminding me.....

    P

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  • Andre

    I'm afraid I have to add my voice to the criticism of your comments, especially with regard to the implication that HR is some sort of "closed shop" where only the right connections, a funny handshake, or at least fifty grey-hairs to the inch "buy" your way in.

    Unlike law, medicine, accountancy or gas-fitting, we are not a profession requiring "registration" before practicing: Anyone can call themselves an "HR Professional", be they someone fresh out of University dripping with degrees and PGCs, or the lowest pay clerk in the pecking order who is told his/her role is now: "...sorting out the bl**dy workers and their moans and groans", and also including someone fed up with getting £75 a week who thinks they might apply for an HR role at the local sweat-shop, who want someone to "hire and fire". 

    (...and all of whom might be similarly unready to practice HR professionally at any senior level)

    So employers get the HR Practice they want to pay for or seek to manipulate; not that which we as a profession would like to offer them.

    That said, the value of "real" HR Practice has gained in value and credibility over the 30 years or so I have been practicing it (in one form or another) thanks largely to the gaining of our Charter and the efforts of CIPD to make it, at the very least, a structured profession with clear and relevant levels of competence, culminating in Chartered Membership and Fellowship; which are neither time-based nor indeed academic-learning based, but can better be thought of as awarded when the mix of what we know and what we understand, both academically and about people (as people and not just as "employees") give us sufficient insight to earn those accolades.

    That is not to say that there are no legitimate criticisms possible of how CIPD functions, or how it awards qualifications, or indeed why it has not pushed harder (if at all) to require registration (given the damage that incompetent or over-confident HR practice can do to both companies and people), but what is absolutely certain is that the apparent scarcity of higher-level HR jobs is not down to the operation of some clandestine "old boys'/girls' network", but the demand for competence by (responsible) employers of people (and HR professionals) in an increasingly hazardous and litigious employment and business environment.

    Without that "current fluency" of practice built up in more junior or supported roles we are a potential menace!

    To take my own case: After some years of (nominal) retirement, and in spite of keeping up to date with (most) leading progressions in HR (or trying to) I for one would not consider myself anywhere near competent to take on a leading HR role for a company at this time without "stepping down" and coming back up to speed first, in spite of my 14 years as a Chartered Fellow and 24 years membership of (C)IPD, with a whole lot of "HR by any other name" before that! (...and irrespective of the mentoring I still do privately, some of it at very senior level with people in very large businesses, and/or my various submissions and exchanges here in the Community.

    Without rancour: You repeatedly offer your opinions of why you seem to be unsuccessful in obtaining a role at a level you believe you deserve, and why this is due to the Profession: Its "failures" or "secret societies", or systems; seemingly without regard for the realities of the profession we practice, the years that we (all members) have struggled to establish its value and strategic relevance, and the fact that within today's business environment, and in such a complex professional field, "one size" of skill-set does not fit all. So all the academic learning in the world, alone, is not going to fit any HR practitioner for stepping straight into a multi-functional generalist HR role at senior level.

    It is not the profession, or how it functions, or who crosses whose palm with silver, that prevents "simply anyone" from being appointed to senior roles; it is maturity (but not age); running toward the flame instead of away from it; providing workable answers and not just mechanistic systems of control, and remembering to use the words: "thank you" when extra effort is made on your (or the company's) behalf. Whether that be by a member of the Board, or the guy sweeping the car park. (...Or indeed the members trying to provide relevant answers "pro-bono" here). All those things  (and a whole lot more) make up the "fit" for senior roles and eventually Chartered Memberships and Fellowships.

    ...and personally, as probably one of the older contributors on these pages, I find any suggestion that my competence assessed award of Fellowship in 2004 might have been due to my age rather than the damned hard work I put in to turning my experience into my portfolio, frankly insulting.

    ....Which reminds me: H.U.B.S. has still got it! They asked to retain it as an example for others to emulate... Thank you for reminding me.....

    P

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