Because HR can fake it too

“Is it a rebellion?” asked Louis XVI of the count who informed him of the fall of the Bastille.

“No, sire,” came the reply. “It is a revolution.”

HR isn’t rebelling like some pissed off six year old who didn’t get his toy at Target, we’re revolting. Revolting against the bad rap HR has gotten.

This weekend is HRevolution in Louisville KY; it’s the first HR unconference. It’s. Going. To. Rock. ‘nuf said.

So, while you are reading this, I’m on the road from Birmingham to Louisville. ETA 3pm, EST. I’m looking forward to bunking with my conference spouse, the always wonderful, Shauna Moerke.

If you’re interested in learning more about HRev, follow the Twitter hashtag #HRevolution.

If you’re attending, I’ll see you there! If you aren’t, my sincerest apologies for you are going to miss a great event.

Viva la revolucion!

I’m fascinated by why. Yes, was one of those kids that drove her mom crazy by asking why the sky is blue, why the grass is green, why I have to go to bed at 8pm.

One of my new favorite why questions is ‘Why HR?’ or rather ‘How did you get to where you are in HR?’

I asked my boss over dinner the other night and wasn’t surprised by her answer.  She attended an EEO hearing via her former line of work and thought “I can do that”. She went back college, got her masters, and with an HR gig here and an HR gig there, welcome to present day.

I know others that knew from the start, HR was their thing; others sort of fell into it through other departments.  I was one of those that fell into HR.  As much as I love what I do now, when I started down what has become my career path, the last thing I wanted to do was HR. I was so against it that I almost missed out on the opportunity to take the road not taken.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of the work or the people, I just didn’t want what I perceived as the burden of knowing everything about the employees I worked with every day.   As things like that go, you either hate or you love it and clearly I loved it, otherwise we’d be talking about loan policies or the Bank Secrecy Act. #CreditUnionsRule!

Present day, I love my job and my work.  That’s why I’m in HR, because I enjoy it.  There are so many facets of HR that to be a true Generalist, to know and have worked all the possible avenues (if that’s even possible), would take fifteen forevers.   The amount of learning never stops growing.  Yes you can fill up on FMLA, FLSA, OSHA, etc until your head a splodes.  But as technology changes, so does the profession and that brings on new applications and new avenues to explore.  It’s not boring.

So that’s the answer to ‘Why HR?’ and even to some extent, ‘How I got here.’

Why are you in HR?

Greetings from St Louis! I know, HRevolution is this week, I’ll be there for that too. I’m in town for training for the day job; gotta pay the bills somehow.

We’re in the process of rolling out a new HRIS as well as an acquisition and the usual year end reporting.  Being labled as the techy has allowed me the opportunity to join the implementation team for the new HRIS.  Having expressed a desire to learn more about our processes as allowed me the opportunity to take on more responsibilities.

As much as we’d like to think our managers remember our resumes, they usually don’t and shouldn’t; they have too much other stuff to do.  So that leaves the responsibility to you to express your desires to learn new skills or expand on skills you brought with you.  If you don’t toot your own horn, who will?

One of my favorite questions to ask potential top performers is “What do you do everyday to  expand your knowledge or professional development?”.  I get some strange answers, some times candidates knock it out of the park other times I hear crickets.  Keeping this question fresh in my mind helps me keep on top of developing my own skills.

Does your manager know your greatest skill or something you want to learn more of? If not, you should tell him/her.

Yesterday was the Birmingham Job Skills Camp at UAB. The event was a huge success.  We had approximately two hundred people between 10am and 12pm.

I volunteered for the welcoming committee which means I stood outside and told people what was going on, where they needed to go for mock interviews, where the vendor hall was, etc.

It was interesting the types of people attending the camp.  I can’t pinpoint any one demographic for the people I saw. There were older people, younger people, well dressed people, people in jeans, people with resumes, people that forgot their resumes. One woman told me she drove 85 miles to get help with her interviewing skills.

A colleague volunteered on the mock interview tribe and had far more interesting stories than I did.  She spoke with one gentleman that was asked to give an example of how he handled an insubordinate employee. His response was essentially “I fired him on the spot because I got annoyed”.

The number of people that were laid off was just astonishing.  I spoke with one woman that had worked at a Bank for 30 years and was let go in downsizing.  She was scared to death about entering the job market.  The job skills camp helped ease her mind a bit. We freshened up her resume, helped hone her interviewing skills and then led her to a chair massage in the vendor hall.  All for free.

The funniest the thing I heard was a young woman, clearly a student, asked me if she could learn about being a TA. I told her “no the camp was for resume critiquing, mock interviews, etc.”  She responds with “Oh, you mean like parent jobs? I’ll tell my dad.”  Oh to be young again.

It’s Saturday, that means SPHR study group for me. Today we covered Total Rewards. This class starts off with FLSA (snooze, I know). During the discussion of exemptions the instructor asks “Which exemption rule does HR typically fall under?”

Executive exemption qualifies if you are supervisor.

Computer exemption doesn’t qualify, typically.

Highly comp is redundant, let’s not even talk about it.

This leaves Administrative and Professional. For those of you that need your FLSA rules brushed up, here’s a quick break down:

According to the SHRM Learning System 2009, an employee qualifying under the administrative exemption must have a primary duty involving performance of office or nonmanual work directly related to the management or general business operations of the employer. Must exercise discretion and independent judgment with respect to matters of significant judgment.

A learned professional exemption encompasses jobs with a primary duty of the performance of work requiring advanced knowledge, defined as work predominantly intellectual in character and including work requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment. The advanced knowledge must also be in a field of science or learning and is customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.  Specialized intellectual instruction restricts the exemption to professional where specialized academic training is a standard prerequisite for entrance.

So I’m sitting in my chair thinking the answer is obvious, Learned Professional.  Not because the certification is [Senior] Profession in Human Resources but because HR requires a level of learning beyond high school, it requires some sort of specialized education and every job posting I’ve seen for an HR position is requiring a degree or certification.

The instructors answer to his own question was Administrative.

Humph, administrative…whatever.

That’s what I thought for the next four hours.  HR is a learned profession, sure you can be trained without the higher level education or specialized study but it takes longer. Even about halfway through writing this I was convinced that was my point of view.  We are learned professionals and as HR grows and solidifies its position as a strategic partner some sort of specialized learning will be required to progress through the ranks in the field.

After doing a little reading and thinking it over, I can see the Administrative qualification. Our work directly relates to the management of the business operations.  As strategic partners we exercise independent judgment with respect to matters of significance; we carry out the strategic plan, that’s rather significant to the business operation.

Which exemption does HR fall under, Administrative or Professional? Yes, in my opinion. At least for right now.

Where do you see yourself and HR qualifying?