HR: A Practical Guide

Most of us would agree that qualifications and formal learning are important for a career in HR, especially for people who are just starting out in the field. My experience has been that as much as qualifications can prepare the groundwork for working in HR, the day-to-day practicalities of your first “proper” HR job can be quite removed from a lot of what’s on the syllabus.

It was with this in the backs of our minds that Gemma Reucroft and I wrote our latest ebook, Human Resources: A Practical Guide, published last week through BookBoon.

Anyone who has read our previous works (on the future of people management and “Putting Social Media To Work” – available here and here, by the way!) will know that we take a very pragmatic and straightforward approach to HR and we’ve taken that a step further with this book. Most chapters have either a “things to think about” or a “recommendations” list at the end, designed to offer readers a practical starting point for each topic.

As we wrote in the book’s introduction:

…there are many different roles that are covered by the umbrella term of HR. You may be a generalist, expected to have a good knowledge of all of the specialist subjects, especially if you work in a smaller organisation. You may be an expert in a specific area like Reward, Recruitment, Employment Relations, Learning & Development, Information Systems… the possibilities are endless! Whatever your flavour of HR, we believe there are some general principles that apply to doing good ‘people stuff’ that we’ll keep referring to throughout this book.

We have tried to summarise our own experiences and learnings from our HR careers, which we hope will be useful to others. Lots of books about HR and management are weighty, complex tomes. We have aimed to make this one straightforward and accessible (largely because we like things that way ourselves), with practical recommendations derived from our own trial and error along the way.

Obviously we love anyone and everyone reading our stuff but we hope that those just starting out, people who have been given HR responsibilities for the first time and anyone just wanting a refresher on the broad topic that is HR find the new book particularly useful. It’s always lovely to hear from anyone who does – and you can find us on Twitter (of course – Tim and Gemma) or most of the other major social networks!