Hi Lewis and welcome to our Community.

There are some good previous discussion threads here:

https://community.cipd.co.uk/search?q=Business%20Partner#serpcategory=forum

In my opinion, it's a very vague title that in some places means an HR Officer (i.e. someone between an Administrator and Manager in terms of experience and scale of responsibility) and in some places means a very strategic role which partners with a particular area of the organisation.

For context, I've worked in HR for most of the last 20 years at many different levels and never once had that job title, though I have been Personnel Administrator, Assistant School Manager (HR), HR Manager, UK HR Manager, Learning and Development Business Partner, Head of People Development and Director of People!

Acknowledging this isn't very helpful (sorry) I don't think there is a specific route unfortunately. The boundaries between different job levels aren't common across organisations and therefore the way to progress isn't easy to map. My best advice would be to look at the job descriptions and criteria for the jobs that interest you, audit where your skills meet those criteria and make a plan for how to gain the bits that are missing. For me, early in my career, that was a mixture of work shadowing, study, volunteering for projects and briefly being a union rep.

A proper business partner should be operating under the Ulrich model, directly supporting a specific business unit and working closely with the unit's SLT, primarily on strategic issues rather than ER casework (although some casework has strategic significance).

But as Gemma says, it can sometimes just be a glorified HR Advisor with an inflated job title. If the salary is less than £45k, it's almost certainly the latter. If it's more than £60k it's probably the former.

Calling something a "Strategic Business Partner" becomes unclear because our friends in Finance have got in on the Business Partner thing and you also have Finance Business Partners (very similar model to HRBPs but with money rather than people), but if you know that the Strategic Business Partner is an HR role then it's likely to be closer to the Ulrich model than an inflated Advisor.

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Thanks Steve, I'll take an in-depth look through those posts and see what I can learn!

In reply to Gemma:

Thanks Gemma, that does help. Those blurred boundaries do help me to understand that it's a role that can mean a lot of different things to different companies. I'm on with my CIPD Level 5 at the minute although I started that simply as a way to formalise what I've learned as a people manager in the last 10 years but that qualification is helping me to find my path too.

In reply to Robey:

Thanks Robey, I'll look into the Ulrich model so I can understand that a bit more, I'm at the start of my journey of formalising my HR knowledge but this is the career pathway that resonates with me at the moment so I want to learn all I can!

The salary part is good info, I know it's not concrete information but it makes it clear to me that some roles will be looking for a jack of all trades type rather than a strategic partner and that's important to know going in!

In reply to Lewis:

Best of luck with it all!