HRGuru

Is the HR Business Partner Model Killing Your Career?

Featured Author:

Scott McArthur

Scott McArthur is a Management Consultant (Atos Consulting), public speaker and writer on HR and people development. He has delivered learning events and speaking engagements in Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, China and the USA.

Scott McArthur on HR 2.0: “There is a revolution happening right now, the world is changing and it may represent the most significant change in human relations since the industrial revolution. The revolution is the move from manpower to knowledge power the medium is Web 2.0”

Check out Scott’s Blog: McArthur’s Rant – Human Resources, Organisations and HR 2.0.

More articles from this author:

• What is Human Resources Outsourcing Doing for You?
• Is Positive Psychology The Answer to Employee Engagement and Improved Performance?
• The Devil and the HR Professional

The current trend of outsourcing transactional HR to services centres may be creating a future talent crisis for HR professionals.

Back in the 1990’s, when I began my HR career, I started off by looking after flexitime, recruitment administration, childcare vouchers, staff welfare and manpower planning. I knew if I knuckled down and got to know the technical elements of my role that my next step would be to the much coveted role of Assistant Personnel Officer. I then moved into more specialist areas such as executive reward, graduate recruitment, employee engagement and employee relations.

This trend continued, and it eventually lead me on to roles such Personnel Officer, HR Manager, Head of HR and ultimately to HR Director.

As my career developed I always had (and still have) people that I respected and who acted as my mentor. These individuals tended to be in one of the rungs further up my career ladder. Consequently, whilst I always aspired to attain advancement I knew that to get there I would have to know my HR.

This week I have been working on a development programme for HR professionals and was asked by my client if I could, “…consider the career progression for HR professionals…” in her business. I was thinking about this and realised that the business has already outsourced almost all of the duties that I cut my teeth on back in the day. So I wondered, how can aspiring HRBPs gain the required grounding in HR if there is no ground for them to stand on?

I’ve expressed my concerns about how many organisations appear to be misinterpreting the Ulrich model by focusing primarily on the “strategy” role. Surely if this is the approach taken these organisations will not be able to grow talent into HRBP roles and will therefore have to resort to what will be an increasingly competitive external market?

HR Business Partner – A failure?

According to Personnel Today referring to research by Roffey Park:

“A backlash against the much-feted human resources (HR) business partner model appears to have begun after research revealed that more than half of managers were unconvinced by the structure.

.....One in four said the model was ineffective, while the rest were undecided on the merits of the increasingly popular system.”

Well there’s a shock! Yet another provider of HR development programmes claiming that HR does not have the skills to meet the expectations of business! Call me cynical, but what else would they conclude from their own research?

Perhaps the issue is that HR has not had access to appropriate development programmes or has failed to implement the model, as developed by Ulrich, appropriately?

Ulrich himself dismissed the notion of the partner some 7 years ago for goodness sake. There is a problem with HR and how it is perceived, but that is not new. What we must do is stop debating our place in the universe and get on with delivering people solutions to our respective organisations.