The Certified in Human Resources

By Zulk Shamsuddin

The Certified in Human Resources ™ (CHR) credential is a professional world-class certification that demonstrates the attainment of a defined level of technical knowledge in human resources practices and ethical behavior. It forms the basis of the assessment that candidates must pass to gain the Certified in Human Resources ™ credential and inclusion in the Register of The Global Academy of Finance and Management® Certified / Chartered Professional.
Individuals with several years of experience in human resources are encouraged to acquire this certification.
Introduce yourself with this exclusive membership card during networking, business events, conference, anywhere. Membership has its privileges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716382789

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Zulk Shamsuddin, PhD / GAFM ACADEMY

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-716-38278-9

INTRODUCTION

The Certified in Human Resources ™ (CHR) credential is a professional world-class certification that demonstrates the attainment of a defined level of technical knowledge in human resources practices and ethical behavior. It forms the basis of the assessment that candidates must pass to gain the Certified in Human Resources ™ credential and inclusion in the Register of The Global Academy of Finance and Management® Certified / Chartered Professional. Individuals with several years of experience in human resources are encouraged to acquire this certification.

Introduce yourself with this exclusive membership card during networking, business events, conference, anywhere. Membership has its privileges.

Benefits of becoming a Certified in Human Resources

Personal recognition from your peers in HR manager profession.

Enhanced CV to stand out in the job market and get noticed by top recruiters.

A framework for the development of your career.

International recognition.

Assurance for clients of high standards and ethical practice.

Use of the post nominal CHR or Certified in Human Resources ™

This book shall guide you to prepare for the Certified in Human Resources ™ examination besides providing a good source of reference for a professional to excel towards becoming a Certified in Human Resources. 

Importance of Certification

Certificates and certifications, the names for these credentials sound confusingly similar. But there are important differences. Here’s what you need to know about these resume-enhancing options and how they might advance your career.

What Is A Certificate?

Earning a certificate is about education. Certificates are academic credentials awarded by colleges, universities or other educational institutions. Students in certificate programs learn new knowledge in a specific subject or discipline and earn a certificate by successfully completing the coursework. An ideal student for a certificate program is someone who is willing to go through the experience of growing their own skillset, being real about what they want to learn, and working with others, says Jennifer Diamond, an instructor for the UW Certificate in Project Management. Many certificate programs have few, if any, admission requirements, making them an excellent option if you want to move forward in your career. The programs are usually noncredit and take less time to complete than a degree. Certificates are commonly listed on resumes as education, and some meet education requirements for first-time or renewed certifications.

What is a Certification?

When you have the professional knowledge you need, a certification allows you to prove it.  Certifications indicate mastery of skills or standards. Professional certifications are granted by industry groups or career-related organizations. These groups assess your qualifications, usually through an exam or application process. Many certifications include the privilege to use a related designation following your professional title. Certification differs from a license, which permits you to work in a certain profession and is usually issued by government or regulatory agencies.

CHAPTER 1      THE CERTIFIED IN HUMAN RESOURCES

The HR manager plays a crucial role in collecting, structuring, analyzing, and reporting on HR processes and data. A Certified in Human Resources is an experienced human resources professional who has earned the accredited gold-standard Certified in Human Resources ™ credential from The American Academy of Project Management®. This credential is offered to the individual with several years of experience as a human resource management professional.

HR manager has a broad role and depending on the organization, HR manager will be asked to focus on different tasks. Quite a few organizations are looking for an HR manager with predominantly soft skills. This makes the analyst’s function profile very similar to an HR business partner. Yet other organizations are really looking for a data analyst role. Be aware of this if you apply for such a job! This also means that you very rarely see an analyst who is doing data analysis for 100% of their job. They are usually involved in other operational tasks as well. A funny thing we’ve noticed is that the more ‘data’ is mentioned in the job title, the more data-oriented the job usually is. Although there is no official job role, an HR manager is usually less data-oriented than an HR data analyst, who is again less data-oriented than an HR data scientist. The latter is usually occupied with analyzing data full-time.

Business Acumen

Business acumen is becoming increasingly important for HR roles. The same holds true for the HR manager. Before you analyze data, you need to know what project you will work on and how the data analysis will impact the business. Business acumen is an essential skill for any analyst who is involved in either simple data analysis or in an end-to-end analytics project.

Communication and Consultation

The second skill is communication and consultation. Whether you’re spending most of your time analyzing data or only very little, you need to talk to the business, manage stakeholders and their expectations, and communicate results of an analytics project to the relevant audiences.

Relationship Management

As an analyst, it is key to manage relationships and stakeholders. Expectation management is a requirement for analytics success. In addition, you need to keep the business involved in your analytics project and keep them up to date in progress and potential setbacks.

HR Expertise

Whether you’re more on the business partner side of the analyst role, or crunching numbers every single day, HR expertise is an essential skill. This expertise touches almost everything you do in your job. HR expertise can be divided into three key areas:

Knowledge of the science behind what we do in HR

Knowledge of HR best practices

Understanding of the key HR processes

Data Analysis

The HR data analyst is involved in the basics of data-driven HR in the organization. For most organizations, this entails (ad hoc) reporting and dashboarding. In order to accurately report on HR data, the analyst is involved in the aggregation of data, maintaining HR data quality, and the analysis of data. Depending on the data maturity of the organization, these reports can be ad hoc. Ad hoc reporting means that the information has to be manually retrieved from the systems for reporting and analysis. This kind of data often needs to be cleansed as well – which may take a lot of time.

More mature organizations have automated this process. This makes reporting less time consuming and the analyst can focus on analyses that add more value than basic reporting, like predictive analyses. Competencies required for this include strong attention to detail and a strong drive to use data to answer business questions.

HR Systems and Implementation

HR data comes from HR systems, often referred to as the Human Resources Information System (HRIS). These transactional systems contain most of the data that the HR manager works with. Implementing, maintaining, and updating these systems is part of the analyst’s responsibility.

Global and Cultural Awareness

HR data is almost never local. As an analyst, you work with global data. Global and cultural awareness is essential to understanding where data is coming from and how cultural differences impact HR and data capturing practices.

How To Become A Certified In Human Resources?

The standard requirement for an HR manager position is domain experience in HR. HRM studies or a background in industrial and organizational psychology are usually considered highly relevant. Alternatively, a background in economics, statistics, or analytics is also considered. People with these kinds of backgrounds bring a unique set of quantitative skills that most people with an HRM background are missing. This background often requires complementary training in HRM practices.

Difference between an HR data analyst and HR business partner. We already hinted a few times about the similarities between the HR manager and the HR business partner’s job. Where the analyst’s job focuses primarily on the collection, analysis, and reporting of data, the business partner (BP) is more involved in communication with line managers and helping to solve their HR-related problems. In practice, the BP relies for 90% on soft skills, while the analyst relies just as much on harder (data) skills as on soft skills, if not more. This means that the HR BP is an internal consultant who helps the manager achieve business objectives. Sometimes this work is very operational, sometimes it’s more tactical – but it is very applied to the business. In case the BP and manager run into problems that can be solved using data, the HR manager comes in.

The analyst helps to define the problem and leverages data to solve it using the skills described previously. Because the BP is increasingly trained in analytics and has to be able to interpret data to actively advise managers, the roles become diffused and that’s why you sometimes will find a company asking for an HR manager while they are actually looking or a business partner.

HR manager Career Path

It is hard to map a well-defined career path in today’s world. Usually, you start as a junior analyst and can grow your way to a senior analyst position. The data-driven mindset of an analyst is increasingly popular and looked for in management positions. Career paths to becoming HR manager and HR director are available, as well as horizontal paths towards (senior) Human Resources Generalist, or the more specialized Human Resources Information System Analyst and HRIS manager.

HR Manager Job Description (example)

Job Summary:

The Human Resources Manager will collect, compile, and analyze HR data, metrics, and statistics, and apply this data to make recommendations related to recruitment, retention, and legal compliance.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

None.

Duties/Responsibilities:

Collects and compiles HR metrics and data from a variety of sources including the human resource information system (HRIS) and payroll outputs, management and employee surveys, exit interviews, employment records, government labor statistics, competitors’ practices, and other sources.

Analyzes data and statistics for trends and patterns with attention to recruitment, hiring practices, motivation, turnover, and compliance with employment laws and regulations.

Prepares reports of data results, presenting and explaining findings to senior leadership.

Identifies and recommends reasonable short- and long-term goals, milestones, and benchmarks for key performance metrics.

Based on metrics and analysis, makes recommendations for policies and activities to improve the organizational culture including suggestions to attract and hire qualified candidates, to motivate and retain employees, to address staffing issues, and to maintain legal compliance.

Facilitates implementation of new training, development, recruiting, and other related initiatives.

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