Career Opportunities Post Pandemic in Human Resource Management

The COVID-19 Pandemic had been a disaster for the entire humankind. Over the period of two years, we had a horrific experience with huge loss of life, economic slowdown, and social dissociation – a distressful journey indeed. However, as darkness ends with the dawn, the COVID-19 Pandemic is expectedly going to end with new rays of hopes and aspirations. This pandemic has unfolded many new scopes and has paved the avenues for new learning and employment opportunities.  

As the global business with its international, national, and local dimensions wobbled during this pandemic, the most impacted component was the workforce with plenty of documented retrenchments due to feeble allocable reserves and surplus. It had been a catastrophe for the millions of families worldwide who lost their livelihood during this phase. However, there is an opinion that this virus-induced debacle had purged the unemployable section of the workforce retaining the competent and highly employable workforce only. 

This apparent challenge is the actual opportunity for the young and energetic community of prospective employees. This pandemic has made a paradigm shift in the work process. The emergence of paperless and internet-based work processes had been observed in both the industries – manufacturing and service. The employees had to unlearn many things and learn many new things to acclimatize to the new set of business processes. 

The use of information technology has become obligatory for the organizations in the present recession phase of pandemic, and the process demands more IT orientation of employees in the post-pandemic era. Business process integration is the new feature of any performing organization and the enterprise resource planning or ERP modules are being used by most of the market leaders. In addition to that, business analytics structuring the framework of presentation and analysis of data, and interpretation of results, has become an integral part of the business strategy formulation. 

The students of management – both undergraduates and postgraduates are exposed to immense career opportunities nowadays when the pandemic seemingly weaning off. Although the organizations are trying to return to their pre-COVID operational modalities, the aforementioned paradigmatic change will resist the full retreat toward the “old normal”. Hence, the business process has already taken a new shape of information technology orientation. 

 The undergraduate and postgraduate students of human resource management can pursue their careers in ERP operations. SAP AG, the world’s one of the most renowned ERP service providers recommends the employment of the management graduates who can work as the front-end user and can enter important human resource management data in the ERP. The clients of SAP AG, therefore, follow the above-mentioned recommendations and the demand for ERP front-end users is soaring high, both at the national and international levels. In this job, the knowledge of management operations and regulatory components (e.g. the country’s labour acts or codes) is essential. Therefore, undergraduate students with thorough knowledge of these HR managerial aspects will have career opportunities to work with prominent organizations. This opportunity is equally applicable to the other management domains also. 

The postgraduate students of HR Management can have the opportunity to function as backend support consultants for this SAP AG ERP. In this regard, they should be able to configure the structure of the HR operations through their IT skills and knowledge of human resource management. It is again not restricted to the domain of HR management only and shall be applicable for the other segments of management also. 

The second area of opportunity is in the domain of business analytics. The HR management has its own variant termed “HR analytics” where the generic features of business analytics will be preserved with specific application areas of HR operations. 

While companies have been using people and HR analytics for a long time, the roles within these areas are changing. HR analytics specialists, as a younger section of the HR community, sometimes face challenging career pathways both within and outside of the function. In view of that, the HR analytics experts must build analytical and technical competence in a field that frequently demands a high level of technical and managerial proficiencies. 

Domain experience in HR is a basic qualification for an HR analyst post. HRM courses or a foundation in industrial and organizational psychology are typically thought to be extremely useful. 

A background in economics, statistics, or analytics is also taken into account. People with these types of backgrounds bring a distinct set of quantitative skills that most HRM professionals lack. This background frequently necessitates additional HRM training. MS Excel expertise is a must-have talent. Most firms still use this and knowing how to combine worksheets and use Pivot Tables to analyse big amounts of data is commonly regarded as elementary. 

Work experience in HR is always advantageous, as is experienced with HRIS systems. Relevant experience with the organization’s tools and systems also works in employees’ favour. Tableau, PowerBI, Qlik, SAP, SuccessFactors, and more tools are examples. 

As far as the smaller businesses are concerned, they frequently struggle to find staff with the necessary abilities to assist them in making the transition from measurements to analytics to event prediction. According to Ms. Julie Schweber, of Society for Human Resource Management, this staffing gap will ensure opportunities for the undergraduates and postgraduates of human resources and other domains of management. 

Work From Home (WFH) and Work From Anywhere (WFA) are two emerging industry trends that will need a remote workforce and related digitization. HR workers will need to learn technological skills in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence in the future. In order to advance in an HR job, a student must re-skill himself. Human technology specialists, culture specialists, prejudice detection specialists, and other HR positions are possible in the post-COVID-19 period.  

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