12.1 HR Professionalism and Certification
In today’s work world, HR employees need to be professionals which includes having specific qualifications. They need to have a set of competencies which include knowledge, skills, abilities, and attributes (KSAs) that are needed to perform their job effectively. As well, they need to have characteristics that infer they are professionals:
- A common body of knowledge
- Standards that are consistent
- An association that is professional that they join
- A code of ethics
- Credentials and designations
- Life long learning
HRM is a specialized area, much like accounting, marketing, or finance. In this section, for our Ontario students, we borrow extensively from the material produced by The Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA), the professional association that governs HR professionals in Ontario. Later in the section, we will discuss the HRPA in more depth, but first, we explore the competencies that are important to have for an HR professional, as defined by the HRPA .
Competency Framework
The diagram below illustrates the functional areas and enabling competencies in the HRPA Human Resources Professional Competency Framework. The numbering of the functional areas below corresponds to that used in the text that follows.
“Skills Needed for HRM” in Human Resources Management – 2nd Ontario Edition by Elizabeth Cameron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
