12.1 HR Professionalism and Certification

In today’s work world, Human Resources employees need to be professionals which includes having specific qualifications. They need to have a set of competencies which include knowledge, skills, abilities, and attributes (KSAs) that are needed to perform their job effectively. As well, they need to have characteristics that infer they are professionals:

1. A common body of knowledge
2. Standards that are consistent
3. An association that is professional that they join
4. A code of ethics
5. Credentials and designations
6. Life long learning

HRM is a specialized area, much like accounting, marketing, or finance. In this section, for our Ontario students, we borrow extensively from the material produced by The Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA), the professional association that governs HR professionals in Ontario. Later in the section, we will discuss the HRPA in more depth, but first, we explore the competencies that are important to have for an HR professional, as defined by the HRPA .

Competency Framework

The diagram below illustrates the functional areas and enabling competencies in the HRPA Human Resources Professional Competency Framework. The numbering of the functional areas below corresponds to that used in the text that follows.

“HR Professionalism and Certification” from Human Resources Management – 3rd Edition by Debra Patterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.