What are the New Core Competencies of the HR Professional?

Thanks to the rapid rate of technological change, the next-generation HR professional needs to have core competencies that reflect the changing realities of the digital enterprise.

These include both technological competencies – such as a familiarity of how Big Data and mobile can act as competitive drivers for HR – as well as next-generation soft skills, such as the ability to communicate across a number of geographies and cultures.

One important new core competency is the ability to sift through large data sets, a “skill” that usually goes by the name of Analytics.

In the digital enterprise, all data can be a source of competitive advantage, enabling professionals to pull out insights that might not be possible using conventional means. This data could be the key to determining relative strengths and weaknesses across the enterprise, as well as the areas that need to be addressed by future hiring strategies.

For example, these insights might pertain to employee performance across the enterprise. An HR department might know anecdotally which departments or offices have the highest-performing employees, but data helps to quantify what used to be a purely qualitative judgment. This new data set includes both structured data – in the form of number-driven surveys and evaluations – as well as unstructured data, in the form of text-heavy appraisals. In order to work with this data, HR professionals need to have a familiarity with not just statistics and data analysis, but also ways to code unstructured data for future analysis.

The ability to use mobile to drive change within the HR department is an added core competency.

At the minimum, it means taking advantage of all the information within the cloud and then using it on a digital device, such as a smartphone or tablet, and doing so in a secure manner. In previous technology cycles, this was the type of information that resided largely on the desktop or laptop. In today’s mobile enterprise, all information and data must become part of a broader mobile strategy.

Finally, another new core competency of the HR professional is the ability to conduct business across a number of different cultures, languages and geographies.

The days of a business located within a limited geographic area are over – today’s enterprises are completely global enterprises, with workforces dispersed across countries and continents.

Especially in the era of outsourcing, today’s HR professionals need to be able to recognize how and when they can source the best talent, whether it’s in North America, Europe or Asia. This is also the global gig economy, in which freelance and contract workers from all over the world can help to deliver bottom-line growth at enterprises.

Given these new core competencies, the question then arises; how to add these competencies in ways that are organic to the overall mission of the organization?

In many cases, it may require a re-appraisal of hiring strategies for HR itself, with more of an emphasis on individuals who have a background in quantitative, rather than qualitative, fields.

In other cases, it may mean re-imagining the future of the organization to open up new possibilities for HR professionals 😉

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