Unemployed HR Professional Seeking Crash Course in Generalist Skills – Any Recommendations?

Hi all,

I have completed PGDHR from Welingkar's and have 2 years of experience in HR (Recruitments & generalist). Currently, I am unemployed and am looking forward to attending a crash course in HR that focuses on the generalist side. Could you please help me with links where I can find these kinds of courses?

Thanks & regards,
Vinodha

Boss,

I have sympathy with you for not having employment opportunities, but I can guess that this qualification did not offer you proper training to obtain respectable job opportunities. Therefore, you lack confidence in your qualification from Welingkar Institute.

Perhaps this institute did not provide enough exposure to the students and did not prepare them for the market to sell their skills. It seems that no skills have been imparted in this institute; therefore, such educational institutes end up merely selling degree certificates that do not bring any employment opportunities to the students from such institutes.

Welingkar Institute must be informed and held accountable for wasting your money, time, and career. The government should ban such educational institutes that do not provide valid and feasible education to the students.

Dear colleagues, please remember that institutes and candidates engaged in buying and selling education do not provide quality education and ultimately suffer. It's considered cheating if education does not provide you with competency and skill sets to yield greater results.

Rashid

I think you have got it all wrong here. At no point am I blaming my education from Welingkars. I simply want to update myself about the recent HR trends and am seeking a crash course for that purpose. For your information, I also hold an MBA in HR from an international university. I have found everything I learned to be of high quality. Thank you for your concern.

Thanks & Regards,
Vinodha

My friend,

If you are looking for enhancement of skills and knowledge, it means you don't have these skill sets and competencies, and your education, MBA-HR, was a mere certification which did not translate any HR specialization in your armory to deal with today's HR activities in any organization.

My Master's Degree in PM and IR has offered me all necessary competencies and skills when I joined my first job as a personnel officer in the manufacturing industry. I was alone as my erstwhile Personnel Manager and his team of timekeepers and PF Clerk left with him, and I replaced him alone.

They did not even maintain and file PF, ESIC returns, and I had to disburse salary right from my first month on the job, in addition to preparing wage & salary register, PF, ESIC records, recruitment, discipline, facing inspections by Factory Inspectors, and Inspectors under PF, ESIC, Minimum Wages, and attending court cases in the same month.

But I never got upset, and I managed all these with the help of recruiting my close friend as my assistant to work out PF, ESIC records under my guidance, and prepare attendance records and wage and salary register in the same month, attending the office on weekends without any extra remuneration.

All these happened due to my Master's Degree in PM curriculum, which provided me enough exposure during my internship in understanding the functioning of the Personnel Department. This helped me overcome a difficult time. The rest of the HRM tricks I learned from my experience by updating my skills in training & development, disciplinary actions, negotiations with trade unions, salary and wages settlements, and court injunctions against strikes.

I am writing about all my experiences just to explain to you that merely adding certifications will not be enough because experience plays a major role in enhancement and building competencies to become a mature HR professional.

In the later half of my career, I have completed all training in psychometric tests, motivation, counseling, competency profiling, etc., because that was not part of the HR curriculum in my time. But if today's education institutes do not offer training on these HR tools, then this kind of education is far behind modern times.

Instead of going for real experience, merely adding some certifications will not be helpful to start a career and will waste your valuable time spent only earning certifications and no experience.

First, try your luck for a breakthrough for practical experience. Because my experience taught me that when Quality Circles, ISO, TQM, Six Sigma, People-CMM, all these are now history and hardly exist. If you learn something and keep learning without using knowledge, it will not yield any revenue or career. Because the life of such HR interventions is very short; by the time you learn and are ready to practice, a new tool replaces the old one like Balanced Scorecard, BPR, etc., and there is no end.

Rashid

My God Rashid,

Good advice but still not fair enough. What about those who are not getting a job in this recession period? Isn't it better that they keep learning something? Not everyone gets lucky in terms of practical experience. Moreover, whatever we learn in books sometimes takes years of experience to reach a level where we would have the authority to practice the skills we learned from books.

With due respect, advice should not be one-sided. It should be fair enough so that the person can make some use of it as per the current situation or could benefit immediately. I guess in the case of Mr. Vinodha, we are both not sure what his motivation for learning more and doing a crash course is. If we pay attention to his intention, we may be able to help him better.

No offense, please.

Regards,
Chhaya

Dear All,

When using a public forum like this, people should never mention the institution or company name in a negative light. This can trigger responses that are not relevant to the topic or issues raised by the individual.

Today, freely available advice is abundant, without even being sought. The individual mentioned in the letter has two years of experience, marking the initial step in a long career journey. A wise and sensible individual should understand that in any industry, most of us must endure waiting periods with patience.

No academic qualification truly goes to waste if the person knows how to leverage it in any circumstance. Unfortunately, it is observed that the younger generation of today is eager to progress rapidly, lacking patience and a thirst for learning, solely driven by the desire for quick financial gains. While there are exceptions, this behavior is not the norm.

Best wishes,

V. Rangarajan

Hi there,

Most of the students were influenced by hearsay that XYZ Institute is good and will offer employment because they provide good education and market value. However, this gentleman has expressed his frustration in expressing his Institute and link to his unemployment today because he believes that he lacks competency, skills, and needs to invest time, money, and efforts to reinvent HR Management in order to become worthy enough to get a job.

If he is not employed, then he must try to become employed first, then simultaneously try to enhance some modern HR tricks to become a front runner, such as Balance Scorecard, KPI, Competency Profiling, Psychometric Test, etc.

These are fancy HR tools. In India, most employers are mesmerized by the fantasy of these big words. ;)

Rashid
Regards
Rashid

Hi Miss Vinodha,

You seem to be confused as I read your post and concerns. Let me open your eyes that HR is not rocket science; it is an art of managing circumstances in the best possible way. These ways and means are not defined processes. There do exist some HR management concepts, but they are temporary in adopting market trends and short-lived. As I have explained to you earlier, concepts like Quality Circles, TQM, ISO-9002, Six Sigma, People-CMM, and competency mapping have become obsolete today in light of recession and global economic turmoil because these fundamentals have limited utility and life.

Your inexperience is showing in your frustration, but I appreciate your desire to stay ahead of the time. Your approach will lead you to success rather than any crash courses. Just try to be practical, learn all facets of HR, and invest time and effort in learning HR, Personnel, Laws, and Administration skills. This will ultimately produce results.

Rashid

Well… Well… its really upset to have such and arrogant fiery conversations on a social site like this. Seems CiteHR users are slowly forgetting or not even bothered about the terms & conditions that they agree with while signing up on citeHR!!!!
CITEHR IS A PLATFORM FOR ALL HR PROFESSIONALS(whether beginners or extensively experienced!) TO DISCUSS QUERIES; SHARE KNOWLEDGE AND ENHANCE SKILLSETS IN AN AMICABLE WAY!
The rude conversations of Mr. Rashid have evidently proved that he's unable to study and understand the situation in different perspectives. Hope, Mr. Rashid would come out of this and try to behave courteously while interacting with others.
And… of course, Ms. Vinodha, I understand your situation to receive such an embarrassing and unwanted advice over your query from a person who seem to have a least commonsense. Nevertheless, you atleast would have tried to be a courteous professional by not replying to Rashid almost as harsh as he had been! Hope you understand this.

Regards

Mohammed Ibrahim

Dear Sir,
I think you are also sailing with the winds.....
You did not analyse the ground realities...and follow marketing companies who promote their products like competandy mapping, competancy profiling, psychometric test, etc which are only data gathering and has no practical use in real life except for projecting to market that we have acquired these xyz tools but no money or improvement or enhancement is possible if do not invest in building good worl culture and compensation practices to hire best people.
Thats key for success of HR. and not these products.
Rashid

Dear Madam,

Since this is a public forum, people will definitely be eager to share their experiences and their style of managing people. Kindly understand that managing people is an art and skill that is developed over a period of time and through repeated experimentation. As Rashid pointed out, HR practice is not rocket science dealing with inanimate things. Theories will come and go; they are short-lived. What is certain are the strong fundamentals in basic concepts stated by Rashid.

Being eager to update the so-called tools should not come at the cost of the basic concepts of HR practice. The best teacher is the worst experience and circumstances. We are the products of circumstances.

Please be patient during this recession time, and I wish you all the best in your endeavor.

Rangarajan.

Dear Mr. Mohamed Ibrahim,

I fully agree with your intervention that members in this social forum should use it in a most courteous, positive way, and style.

On many occasions, the members have overstepped the framework or guidelines and wrote as though this is a tool for their outburst.

V. Rangarajan.