Yes...
To be an HR professional, it is not sufficient that you have good people skills and have done an HR course.
Today, you need to have your pulse on the market. It is necessary to know a little bit about every other kind of jobs which are there (like Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT), because you are interviewing candidates for these positions. Its very easy to say that the line manager will evaluate knowledge content in the respective fields - and this is true in IT, but I personally feel that we HR folks should be able to eliminate or select a candidate based on his job knowledge... So this means that we must know the basics of his job.
This is scary, because not only do you require to keep up with trends in your own HR field, but you should also have a smattering of information with respect to trends in other fields. In-depth knowledge is not required, unless you are personally after knowledge, but an understanding of the new trends are required.
Added to this, you also need to keep track of changes in the financial, economic and stock markets so that you are able to build cost effectiveness into your HR operations... and also know whom to headhunt, etc.
Some of this stuff would also be required in other functions, but it is more critical in HR simply because we recruit for all divisions and not HR!
So now tell us - Do you still want HR as a career?