Developing your skills as an HR professional

Introduction

This free course will help you to develop some of the skills you will need to be effective as an HR professional. In HR, as in many areas of work, there are technical and practical skills, often based on formal knowledge, which practitioners are expected to be able to demonstrate. For example, a senior HR practitioner might be expected to be able to develop, or lead the development of, HR strategies and policies in a range of areas and to have the formal and specialist knowledge to be able to do this. There are a range of skills, however, that are not peculiar to HR or to any other profession which are often seen as important, even critical, determinants of performance (CIPD, 2010). These include the ability to manage yourself and in particular to manage stress, and to work effectively in groups and teams; they also include the skill of managing your learning.

Learning may come from formal learning situations such as seminars, training courses or studying for educational qualifications. However, most of your learning is likely to be much more informal and drawn from your work and life experiences. This learning depends on your ability to reflect on and draw learning from these experiences (this is often referred to as experiential learning). For some, reflection is quite a natural process but for most of us it is a skill that has to be learned and developed.

In this course you will practise learning reflectively and you will also develop the skills of organising yourself, of managing time and managing stress, and of working in teams or groups.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course B863 The human resource professional [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .