A good insight into the challenges of tomorrow

31 March 2016

We were a small group of students of the MSc in IHRM and HRM attending the CIPD Student conference in Glasgow on 6 February 2016.

What to expect in the next few years? What should we prepare ourselves for as future HR professionals? What are the challenges ahead of us?

We started with an introduction speech: from globalisation and rise of big data to employees set up with electronic chips, we are expected to practice our job in different ways than our predecessors. The ability to adapt to change, and take into account social and ethical responsibility is added value for each one of us.

With a worldwide based workforce, we need to learn how not to discriminate, even if HR is by definition discrimination on skills, competences and experience. The guest speaker Dr. Andrew Timming shared his knowledge on discrimination: good discrimination is based on experience, bad discrimination such as race or gender or even misunderstood discrimination on accents or unconscious such as on skin tone and facial symmetry. How could we avoid it? By just trying out specialised tests, and ensure to limit any biases.

The rest of the day was followed by different conferences to which we could attend depending on our interests. Ruth Stuart from CIPD was leading one of them. It was mainly about how to identify the main KSAs required for future specialists, and the ethical dilemmas we were about to face, such as the increase of living wage for example.

After an hour of lunch and networking with professionals and students, the thematic of contextualising HR within the business was addressed, mainly from the point of view of talent acquisition, and how to link the vision of the company to the talent management ensuring that the best talents are found in a world where the pool of candidates is narrowing.

The professionals also gave us tips to organise ourselves as future HR professionals: from using the right vocabulary to the importance of big data analysis while keeping in mind that ultimately it all comes back to people. Today, HR is a proper business function that requires a mix of business skills and HR ones.

As we broke out into different groups to talk about diverse subjects, one of the guest speakers explained how they managed to change the whole reward structure within her company in less than six months. In the end, it simplified the career’s path and also provided equal pay. Though it was reminded that none of this would be possible without the complete implication of the different stakeholders: employees, line managers, executives and unions representatives.

And finally to conclude this whole day, three professionals gave us their points of view about how to think now about our careers and understand how the changing businesses around us will change the way we practice.

For most of us, it was our first “big” conference in the HR field, and having the points of view from professionals was a real occasion to grab another aspect of our future work. The quick changes of the world need to be addressed and anticipated by us, as we step forward into the labour market. We are the ones who will decide of what the future of HR will be like in the next 30 years. With what we can improve either on a personal plan or on a professional one, this conference was a good insight into the challenges of tomorrow.

Vinzenz Ackermann, Marissa Braun-Besser, Paulina Bravo Contreras, Kristina Dunkhase, Amy Lindley, Meagan Minnings, Tamara Reichold, Polina Stolina, Nike Sudikatis, Xin Tong, and Océane Utard are MSC HRM and IHRM students. Find more information about Santander funding under Opportunities on this website.