Starting any career is tough--you don 't want to start in one job, find out you don 't like it and then start over with another. But as an HR professional, your experience in the field, regardless of its type, will always be valuable. A good way to start an HR career is to determine what side of HR you want to work on: Human Resource Management (HRM) or Human Resource Development (HRD).
HRM means just what it says--human resource management--the management of people or resources in an organization. Almost every working organization has to have some form of HRM staff to take care of basic employee management tasks. HRM encompasses the traditional areas that most people think of as HR, including compensation and benefits, recruiting and staffing, employee and labor relations and occupational health and safety.
An HRM professional might start out as a generalist, then choose a specialty area of HRM such as benefits and become a benefits manager. After that, she may choose to remain in the specialty area, perhaps running all benefits programs at an organization, or move into an HR leadership role as an HR director or VP overseeing both HRM and HRD tasks.
If you like systems, analytics and processes, a career in HRM might make sense. While serving the people in an organization, HRM professionals are typically given ownership over a process, specialty area or task. For example, a recruiting manager in a consumer products firm might be given responsibility for recruiting activities in one department. The manager is then responsible for the entire process--finding and locating candidates, conducting first-round phone screens, scheduling second and final round interviews with candidates, negotiating the details of job offers and completing the hiring paperwork. Sure, there 's a significant amount of interaction with people in this role. But successful recruiters will tell you that a well-managed process relying on recruiting data is the best way to do the