Module 6 - HR software Analysis

• As discussed in Module 1, the future of work will require that a successful HR professional have business acumen, technology savviness,  and project management and execution skills.  Why do you think that is?


Getting straight to the point - it is essential that Human Resources as a function keep pace with the technology that the rest of the core business units use.  Other core business functions such as Finance and Marketing are, as a whole, comfortable with using analytics, numbers, and hard data to develop strategy.  In order to keep a "seat at the table", Human Resources needs to do the same. Human Resources has developed a bit of a reputation for relying on soft data and gut feelings to drive strategy.  In order to overcome this, current HR professionals need to step up their game and, not just keep up, but drive change through true partnership with Finance and Executive Leadership.  This will only happen by speaking their language.  As more transactional tasks are outsourced or completed via self-service, HR's challenge is to not be viewed as overhead.  Like all corporate functions, HR needs to constantly question and validate how they are adding value to the business divisions.  These days, they will succeed by acquiring and developing business acumen, tech savviness, project management and execution skills.




• With the shift of technology to a more collaborative web 2.0 world, how has technology impacted your life and made it better?


Personally, technology has helped me in two ways.  First, my family is scattered across the country.  I am more connected to family using Facebook, Facetime, and IM than I would be otherwise.  Without these tools, connecting would involve letters, phone calls and personal visits. Not many young folks are very prolific with letter writing these days so I doubt that medium would keep me connected to my younger cousins!  I am not a big fan of talking on the phone, so that would not be my go-to communication method and, finally, cross country visits are expensive and time consuming.


The second way that technology has helped me is enabling me to continue my education while also working full time by taking online classes.  I still enjoy actually visiting a campus and attending lectures the "old fashioned" way so a mix of online and classroom education has been my preference.  That being said, attending classes on campus is a bit of a luxury as an adult - it is difficult to work a full time-job, take care of a family, and carve out the time during the day to commute to and from and attend in-person classes.  Berkeley Extension not only offers online classes, but the Learning Management System (LMS) that they use, Canvas, has a great mobile format.  I don't even need wifi or my laptop to check assignments timelines, view lectures, or chat with classmates as I can do it all from my smartphone!  I take Caltrain to work, so this is the perfect window of time that I have to myself where i can login in on my phone and get about 30 minutes of classwork done.  A true timesaver - thank you Berkeley Extension!