Fundamentals of HRM Personal Learning Paper

When I started the first term, it was a doubt as to why a subject as important as
Fundamentals of HRM, which is almost the namesake of the course itself, was for
just one and a half credits. Surely, it demanded an equal worth as other useful but
not so fundamentally important subjects for an HR manager, such as accounting
and marketing. But, it was with an open mind that I approached the subject. I knew
from my past work at an electronics industry that this was one subject I could relate
to from my work experience.
Although I never knew the terms for these, I did see many instances of the HR
department at my previous company in few of the roles as described in our course.
As an Indian HR department of a Korean company, the culture management,
credible activist and operational executor roles stood out. And, I think this is what
this course has really taught me. It has taught me to bind all the HR activities I had
seen in my work experiences into a theoretical picture, which could then be used to
study in more details each of these. Now, for example, I know that a particular
activity of the HR department was part of a certain role, and in further courses, I
could go on and see how that role could have been played better, or how certain
decisions made those implementations not as effective. Also it is easy to point out
which are the HR roles my previous employer was not good at, and how that could
have been improved.
I remember as engineers, during our performance appraisals, we often used to point
out how ironical it was that we were being graded by individuals from the HR
department who could never be graded for their work themselves. Because there
was a general feeling that HR though important, did not have a metric to judge their
work. It rose and fell with the company. And though the last statement is often true,
the course has changed my thought about not being able to measure HR influence
and activities. As has been clearly explained, today there are clearly defined metrics
which measure HR performance as transparently as that of any other department in
a company. The previous line should have a special emphasis on the word today
which presses on the rapidly changing nature of HR. In India, in a matter of two
decades, the field of HR has grown exponentially in terms of influence. This has
been one of the other learnings from this course.
And, with these things in mind, I would like to end with the answer to the question
that I posed earlier. While we may not study accounts and marketing any further
than this term, we do have quite a few HR subjects which will need us to be very
thorough with the concepts we have learnt in this subject. This subject is really a
base course for future HRM courses that we are going to do, and more than just
another subject with credits. This one and a half credit course today has laid a
strong foundation for us to credit ourselves as HR managers in the future.

Vipul Puri