Ashley Bennington, MBA, CHRP

Many leading thinkers will discuss economic cycles, demographics, technology, and shifts in HR philosophy, but as a young Generation Y HR professional, my view of the Future of HR as expressed in PeopleTalk’s Summer 2011 issue, is a product of the last 12 years of my life.

Today, I am 30 years old, and since I graduated from high school, a lot has happened in the world and in my life that has led me to develop a multi-disciplinary view of where HR is headed.

I started business school at Simon Fraser University in the fall of 1999. At this point in time, Gen Y’s were just starting to switch from pagers to cell phones and were activating Hotmail accounts (so we weren’t always surgically attached to technology, but were definitely early adopters). We still registered for our post-secondary courses on the phone. And in the classroom, almost no one had a laptop computer.

SFU Business granted the Bachelor of Business Administration Degree. It required that we complete 40 courses to graduate, and of those 40, roughly 17 had to be completely outside the Business and Economics faculties. Every business student had to complete a regimen of ‘core’ courses, including strategy, law, ethics, economics, mathematics, computer applications, statistics, and the bane of everyone’s existence, managerial economics. We were also required to take introductory courses in a number of business disciplines, including marketing, accounting, finance, information technology, management science, and human resources. Finally, in order to graduate, business students had to select one of these business disciplines as a ‘concentration,’ and complete a number of 3^rd and 4^th year courses specializing in that discipline.

In high school, we had courses in marketing and accounting, so after taking those classes, I had figured that I would go to SFU Business and concentrate in accounting. After a few second year accounting courses and a stint in co-op education at the Canada Revenue Agency, however, I realized that accounting most definitely wasn’t my thing. Then I took two introductory classes in marketing and organizational behavior. I was hooked immediately, and informed the school I was switching my concentrations from accounting and finance to HR and marketing.

I loved HR right from the start. If someone has a ‘revelation’ that tells them what they should do with themselves in life, this was mine. I found the psychological and relationship aspects fascinating, and in looking at my jobs at Tim Horton’s and the Canada Revenue Agency, saw how important HR was in making great workplaces. I read David Foot’s book “Boom, Bust, and Echo” on demographics in modern economies, and I also learned about how our economy was transitioning from an industrial base to a knowledge base. Then, I saw the graduation statistics from SFU Business. Only 8% of grads pursued an HR concentration, so I figured that based on supply and demand, salaries and employment prospects in this field should be pretty good.

SFU Business was a great experience, providing all of its students a very wide breadth of skills, regardless of where students concentrate their depth. Even though I concentrated heavily in HR, I took a number of courses in spreadsheet mathematics, information systems, marketing, sociology/anthropology, corporate strategy, and consumer behavior. Soon enough, I learned that becoming good in one discipline really could help you do better in other disciplines, just like when athletes play in multiple sports.

By the time I’d graduated in April 2003, I felt confident in my skills and education, and wanted to move away from CRA and find a solid HR job. Problem was: the economy had busted post-dot.com boom and jobs were few and far between for new HR grads. I picked up on some projects at CRA that were IT and HR related, but by 2004 my patience had run out and I went back to SFU to complete my MBA, with a specialization in HR.

The MBA program gave me a very strong business acumen, but the graduate level HR courses were truly enlightening. I took electives in marketing and e-commerce, and learned a lot about business intelligence from the corporate strategy class. When the time came to complete HR projects and my thesis, the statistical analysis, spreadsheet, and business intelligence skills proved to come in very handy, often to the point where my professors were asking where I’d learned to do all this and put it all together. It just seemed natural to me to be putting business disciplines together to create something new. After all, I’d been doing it for several years no, in both undergrad and at work.

My MBA project required that I conduct research projects for an organization, and the organization I selected was Fraser Health. I knew nothing of health care, but once inside, I was fascinated by how complex and meaningful the industry was. That project eventually turned into a new full time job in their HR department, running metrics and models to quantify and profile the health care workforce. By no means was this a ‘typical’ HR job, and the job description called for skills in spreadsheets, information systems, mathematics, and HR metrics. A multi-disciplinary education had now turned into a multi-disciplinary job.

Glenn Marcus was my HR director at Fraser Health, and ran a very interesting shop. Rather than go out and purchase expensive HRIS applications to run processes for performance management, recruitment, staffing, grievances, and other areas of HR, he hired full time specialists in information management to develop software applications that could be constantly customized for a complex and changing health care industry. All of these applications generated massive amounts of data, and for someone like me, a treasure trove of information with which to research, model, and make predictions. And what scary predictions they were: massive percentages of health care workers were due to retire in many occupations, while the number of graduates being recruited were dwindling due to fierce competition at home and abroad.

The information we had allowed us to create and track numerous HR metrics, quantify the problems and challenges that HR and the organization had, model and predict the challenges that were coming, and give us the evidence to lobby for the big ‘asks’ of organizational leaders and the government. In the end, changes were made at all levels of the industry very quickly using this horde of information. None of this would have been possible without combining such disciplines as HR, IT, mathematics, management science, marketing, and statistics. In 2007, BC HRMA recognized my work in health care with the Rising Star Award.

After three years, I moved on to BC Hydro. It was here that the HR information being generated by their systems allowed us to quantify their progress on labour budgeting. My previous experience with business intelligence allowed me to dive into BC Hydro’s financial systems, and combine that with their HR databases to track their headcount and labour expenditures over time. By learning their accounting practices and procedures, and fusing that together with what HR was doing, we were able to create a new system of “labour finance” to optimize and manage the size of the temporary and permanent workforce, while balancing overtime, consultants, and contractors. The impacts were in the millions of dollars.

BC Hydro also undertook a big project on generational diversity, as an outgrowth of their well supported programs on overall employee diversity. The generational diversity project was led by two SFU graduate students specializing in business intelligence, and combined with statistical research, HR metrics, and workforce modeling, the organization produced a top notch research report that informed strategic decision making at the departmental and organizational levels. Our team was recognized by BC HRMA in 2010 with the Award of Excellence – Innovation. Again, multiple business disciplines were fused together to create something new that HR could use to drive big decisions well outside the HR department.

The idea of disciplinary fusion for the HR field started on a Post-It note in a café just outside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey in May of 2009. All of the success I’d personally enjoyed to date was due to the skills I’d picked up not only in HR, but well outside of HR. So I began writing down all the business disciplines I knew, started connecting them together with lines, and asked the question, “What do you produce if put these disciplines together?” It was a random and creative exercise, and percolated around in my head until I wrote the article for PeopleTalk earlier this year.

The thing is, I do firmly believe that HR isn’t going to change and grow and advance simply by becoming better at HR: it will also do so because it embraces and uses and fuses other business disciplines to advance itself.