Let’s spend a few hours of a typical day with two imaginary human resources professionals, Samantha and Jacoby. Samantha works in a large metropolitan hospital, and Jacoby works for an international chain of resort hotels.
It’s 9:30 am and Samantha’s first scheduled meeting is with a nurse manager to discuss an ongoing conflict between two employees in the cardiac department.
At the same time, Jacoby is meeting with a colleague to review salary benchmarks for kitchen staff across 12 domestic resorts and 4 overseas resorts. While Samantha listens to the employees who are struggling to communicate effectively, Jacoby is trying to be a market leader in compensation while also making sure the hotel will remain profitable.
Jacoby reads through market research, competitor salary data, and internal pay reports before writing a message to his director proposing pay adjustments that are needed if the organization wants to be competitive.
Meanwhile, Samantha brainstorming with the nurse manager about how they can communicate and prevent further conflict with the cardiac nurses. Afterward, she’ll write an action plan for the nurses and their manager that includes a root cause analysis and a follow-up schedule. She might also research some training programs she can recommend for future development.
As you can see, Samantha and Jacoby are doing very different things in very different settings. So, it might be surprising to learn that Samantha and Jacoby are both human resource professionals.
Samantha is a human resource specialist in employee relations while Jacoby is a specialist in compensation and benefits analysis. Each has a degree in human resource management, but they use their degrees in strikingly different roles across very different industries.
Human resources degrees are so versatile that it can be hard to wrap your mind around all the options out there. But to get your ideas brewing, here are some primary areas a human resources management professional can work in—and some career paths human resources graduates might consider.
The 4 main functional areas in human resources
Think of these large functional human resources areas as different houses. You can go into one of the houses, and then choose from a variety of roles that HR professionals fill in that functional area.
While it is possible to be granular and name eight or nine functional areas, I like to focus on the four broader functional areas of Human Resources.
- Employee relations
- Compensation and benefits
- Staffing and recruitment
- Motivation
Let's take a look at what these functional houses include.
1. Employee relations
When employees and employers have a positive relationship, employees are more likely to be engaged with the work, supportive of policies and loyal to leadership and the mission of the organization.
Employee relations is the area of HR that acts as a bridge between management and employees so that a healthy relationship is possible. With a human resources degree, you can resolve conflicts between colleagues or between leadership and individual contributors, develop policies that create and support the organization’s culture and gather data about employee satisfaction via surveys, interviews, or observations.
As an HR professional in employee relations, you balance the rights of employees with the needs of the organization. Analytical skills are needed while business acumen, legal knowledge, and empathy are also important for success.
2. Compensation and benefits
Fair compensation and competitive benefits help attract, retain and motivate talented people across an organization from marketing to customer service to finance.
Creating fair total rewards systems will involve conducting market research to identify trends in the industry as well as benchmarking jobs against current market salaries. In this functional area, you'll also need to understand some employment law.
Some organizations offer base pay, commission, bonuses or a combination of these. Compensation and benefits specialists must be able to create systems that include all three pay types, educate employees about their total rewards and balance the cost of talent with the financial limits of the organization’s budget.
Samantha and Jacoby showcase the work achieved in two of these four functional areas. With an HR degree, someone might be able to choose the same kind of roles as Samantha and Jacoby or one of the many positions in recruitment or motivation.
It is important to check with potential employers to learn about the specific education, and work experience requirements that are needed to work in Employee Relations, Compensation and Benefits, Recruiting and Staffing and Motivation.
3. Recruiting and staffing
One could argue that staffing is the most important function in an organization. No matter how brilliant a product or service, no matter how pressing the problem it solves, the organization needs the right engineers to design it, the right technicians to manufacture it and the right people to sell it.
Without the right people, the organization will not be a success. Staffing professionals within HR attract, hire and onboard the best talent for each role to build a workforce that supports the organization’s goals.
HR professionals who work in recruiting must have knowledge of the industry they recruit in. They must understand best practices in recruiting, labor laws, pay bands, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) related to talent acquisition.
A human resources degree provides a foundation for these which can be built on in practice.
4. Motivation
The final functional area open to someone with a degree in HR is the motivation function.
HR professionals who specialize in motivation create a workforce that feels valued by management and leadership, engaged in their work and committed to excellent performance. Motivation includes training and development, employee recognition and work-life balance initiatives.
For example: Tory and Monica are on a team of HR professionals in the motivation function. They have recently created a leadership development program for employees identified as high potential.
This required leveraging current materials and purchasing additional learning modules from third party vendors. They also had to create an application process for those employees interested in the opportunity to develop their leadership skills.
They are interviewing vendors to participate in an awards luncheon where employees will receive public kudos, trophies, gift cards and stipends to recognize their excellent work in customer service. Tory made it a priority to ensure that members of management and the leadership team would attend.
Monica is especially proud to share with the team that her proposal for the company to reimburse exercise equipment purchases up to $300.00 per year was approved. She spent months surveying employees about their preferred benefits and reviewing data on which current benefits were most and least used. She found ways to connect the reimbursement plan with the organization’s goals, and then wrote a proposal defining the scope of the program, detailing the eligibility requirements and justifying the $300.00 reimbursement cap.
Tory and Monica are both using their HR degrees to increase employee engagement and improve retention rates throughout the organization. Their work benefits the business by ensuring a productive and efficient workforce, and it benefits employees by focusing on their physical, mental and financial health.
Human resources career options
Most people want to grow professionally. The term dead end job speaks volumes about how important being able to move forward is to most individuals. A degree in human resources allows for entering the people operations field at a variety of levels and then progressing laterally and vertically.
While there is no one career path in human resources management (HRM), there are titles and corresponding responsibilities common to HR professionals.
Entry-level human resources job titles
Entry level positions typically include assistant or coordinator in the title. Depending on the functional area you choose, you could have a title like human resource assistant or human resources coordinator--or your title could include the functional area you choose, such as compensation and benefits coordinator or assistant recruiter.
An HR assistant or coordinator is likely supporting all of the higher-level human resources professionals via managing employee records, scheduling meetings/interviews, and focusing on the administrative tasks associated with onboarding.
Some of these entry-level human resources roles are an option with an associate's degree in human resources.
Mid-level human resources job titles
Midlevel human resources professionals tend to have job titles including terms like generalist, specialist or even HR business partner. A generalist might work across several functional areas and may have direct reports or manage a budget as well.
Human resources specialists will have expert knowledge in one area of HR (think of those functional areas again) so a change management specialist will help teams navigate organizational, societal or economic changes; while training and development specialists will understand how adults learn and will create training programs that result in changed behavior and improved performance.
A training and development specialist, a benefits specialist, HR specialists in general dig into one function of human resources that they are especially interested in.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, human resources specialists typically need a bachelor's degree in human resources, business or a related field.1
For more about this level of HR, check out Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Human Resources Specialist.
Advanced human resources job titles
Managers are senior level HR professionals. They manage and lead an entire HR department of generalists and specialists. Human resources managers must be innovative thinkers and expert problem solvers while ensuring best practices are followed, policies are enforced, and the work of the HR department aligns with the business’s goals.
A human resources manager might lead a team of people focused on one functional area, like recruitment or employee training. Or they might oversee the HR department in general.
HR director, chief human resources officer and Chief People Officer are all executive-level titles. These HR professionals focus on strategy and structure, not just of human capital but the entire organization. They collaborate with other executives like the Chief Financial Officer to impact business decisions that impact the organization now and in the future. These types of roles often require advanced education, like a master's degree, along with extensive experience in the field.
Human resources degree programs open many doors
Human resources has evolved from a transactional administrative role (make sure employees get paid, manage staffing) to an operations role—and now to a strategic role.
As a dynamic field focused on business rather than a personnel department focused on paperwork, human resources offers an opportunity to shape organizational culture, improve and maintain employee engagement and create and implement functional-level, business-level and corporate-level strategy.
Whether resolving conflicts like Samantha, analyzing total rewards systems like Jacoby, or promoting morale like Tory and Monica appeals to you, a degree in human resources prepares you to build a career from coordinator to director across industries and geography supporting your organization and advocating for your colleagues.
Now, see what the education would involve by checking out Rasmussen's bachelor's degree in human resources page.
Or if you are unsure if human resources really is the industry you are looking for, check out 12 Rewarding Reasons to Work in HR.
1Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Human Resources Specialists, (date accessed), ;Human Resources Specialists : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)
