Great Post!
Somehow I stumbled upon your post from a variety of other HR blogs…
I graduated last month with my B.S from Purdue- Organizational Leadership with a certificate in HR. I maintained a 3.9 overall, straight A’s in the HR classes..
I am currently interning for a nonprofit, but not doing as many HR duties as I would like to. I have not tinkered around with HRIS at all, only maintained a large Access database of volunteer files and developed a few position descriptions. Even though I received perfect scores in my HR classes, I feel lost and confused in the “real world”. There is only so much you can teach a class about HR. Most of it is so industry- or organization-specific. My university offered credit for an internship, but it was not mandatory or strongly encouraged by advisers.
I’m still struggling to gain valuable HR experience- even in a HR internship role! I’m given loosely related HR tasks that a well-trained monkey could do. And I can’t blame them… it’s a daunting task- trying to teach a new grad about everything HR in 20 hours a week- much easier to have them do data entry and then let them slap it on their resume.
And as Karen mentioned, the catch-22 is frustrating. I need years of exempt level HR experience before I can earn the PHR, yet… how do I get that experience without the certification? I don’t want to be an intern for 4 years…

*heavy sigh*

I cannot agree with you more on this subject! I came out of school back in ’04 with a Bachelor’s in Management & Admin w/ an HR Concentration and I can definitely tell you that most of what is taught today does not prepare you for the “real world” of HR.

Of course, I had one professor that was fantastic and kept up with the latest research and how HR really worked in today’s environment, but the other professors were just clueless. Many of which have never even worked in HR – they just achieved degree after degree and then preceed to tell me how HR works. Or you have the few that worked in HR when it was Personnel and we can both say that HR today has left Personnel at the station.

I currently teach Performance Improvement as an adjunct and I don’t have a single test in my course, but rather a course project that the student has to apply the Performance Improvement model to a real life client. How much more can you appreciate learning – you are applying what you are learning and can put this on a resume!!! I only wish more professors has done the same when I was in college.

The technology side will always be hard to teach because it is hard to get HRIS companies to provide software to universities (PeopleSoft, AS/400, etc.) because the software costs quite a bit and it requires a great investment on the universities part with a server that could run the software. However, this one I am still trying to figure out because I am trying to put together an HRIS course to teach without just teaching from a book – what do you learn from that? Technology is very hands on….especially if are going back to using AS/400 which is the “green screen” days and “F” keys.

Great post!