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For HR professionals feeling stagnant about their careers, or simply curious about what the next role might look like, HR industry analyst Josh Bersin has a new tool for you.
The Josh Bersin Company last month released its HR Career Navigator tool. With a résumé or LinkedIn profile, every HR pro—regardless of subfunction—can understand how their skills, competencies, and specializations stack up.
The tool offers users a look at what professional development might be needed to move up or across the function, and can connect people pros to others for guidance and mentorship.
“Companies do not invest in this profession at all,” Bersin said. “The amount of money spent on career development for non-HR people is 10–20 times higher than it is for the HR people. So somehow everybody in HR is expected to make everybody else’s career better and somehow figure out how to manage their own in their spare time.”
The tool is free to use, although it does recommend content from the Josh Bersin Academy, which costs $495 annually to access. It relies on AI to scan the submitted résumés and profiles to match the career profiles to the more than 90 HR capabilities the Josh Bersin Company has identified through its research.
“What we’re trying to do is give people visibility into this industry, so everybody in HR can figure out where they are in this global ecosystem, and [identify] what they want to do next—or what do they think they want to do next—and what are the roles available,” Bersin said.
Without a broad set of skills and knowledge, specialized HR professionals may find themselves with limited career pathways, Bersin said. But, he added, if they’re better able to see where their skills overlap with another role across the function, they can better find the career development to move over.
“There are more than 250 job titles in HR that are big, and then there’s all sorts of small ones that are strange, and they’re really not linked together in a traditional path,” Bersin said.
That, Bersin contends, is different from other sorts of job functions. A green sales rep can see a mapped career path all the way up to VP of sales, for instance.
“Most HR people are very, very good at some things and then very unaware of a whole bunch of other things because they’ve been thrown into very specialized roles,” he said. “The industry itself is suffering from too much specialization, because the real power of a great HR person is they actually understand a lot of things.”