The HR profession has never had a simple role to play in organisations, but the Covid-19 pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, change in technological capability and upcoming significant shifts in legislation in the UK, all make for a particularly potent cocktail of challenges.
If you asked the average practitioner what they hoped the next few years would hold, for many, the simple answer might be ‘a bit less of all this’. It probably wouldn’t be, no matter their views on the benefits or otherwise of legislative changes, some of the potentially most wide-ranging changes in employment law in decades.
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That desire for stability doesn’t reflect a lack of ambition or a lack of hope, but a reasonable response to a period of unremitting change. If you were to travel back 20 or 30 years then some elements of the profession’s work that were, perhaps, looser expectations, are now concrete parts of the role.
We recognise 10 specialisms within the CIPD’s Profession Map, but there are brilliant professionals stretching some of the definitions by working in the cracks between individual specialisms or by overlapping them. The profession has consistently increased its strategic influence, on top of living up to high expectations around technical excellence and execution.
That leaves a profession that is expected to support in multiple dimensions and multiple overlapping disciplines. A profession where that expertise needs to be felt and delivered in day-to-day practice, but also delivered at a strategic level with a significant planning horizon.
One of the notable upsides of that shift in demand is that it’s easier than ever to argue that the work of the practitioner is both very important and demands high levels of expertise. That should be a source of pride to every person involved in driving that shift in recognition and expectation.
There are more people working in the profession than ever, and we are seeing record numbers of students pursuing CIPD qualifications and committing to their continuing professional development as CIPD members. The profession is growing, its influence is clearly growing, but we know from Spider-Man that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.
That maxim holds, whether you are involved in long-term workforce planning, a complex disciplinary process or, in a far less frequent use case, if you have been bitten by a radioactive spider. It’s simply too easy to pick examples of where damage has been done through an absence of expertise.
Examples range all the way from the high-profile cases that reach the attention of the media, through to the conversations we all almost inevitably get drawn into, when asked for advice by a friend or family member about poor practice.
As a profession, we excel at supporting other business areas to develop and evolve, but often to the detriment of our own professional development. And at the CIPD, we’ve long made the case – to the profession, to employers and to public policymakers – for greater investment in skills and continuous learning and development.
But to make our greatest impact, our profession needs to get better at practicing what we preach. We need to work hard to maintain our competence, confidence and credibility, so that, in a world of work that never stands still, organisations can rely on our up-to-date insights and expertise.
In most organisations it would be a distinctly unusual move to hire a financial director without a background or qualifications in the area, or an IT manager who stopped training five or 10 years ago, because leaders recognise how important it is to ensure that our financial accounts and our digital infrastructures are in expert hands.
We’re pleased to see an increasing number of organisations have the same high expectations of the teams they entrust with supporting their people’s performance and wellbeing, because they know that for organisations to succeed, we need to enable people to succeed. But expectations of professionalism in HR, learning and development and organisational development are not yet the norm like they are in finance, and that simply has to change.
If we’re to fulfil our profession’s ultimate purpose – championing better work and working lives for everyone – we need to raise expectations and meet those expectations.
Amidst the potent cocktail of challenges I described at the beginning of this piece, this may sound like an overwhelming amount of change, but the beauty of being part of a global community of professionals is the availability of support from a profession with an established track record of finding a way forward together.
David D'Souza is the CIPD's director of profession
