What are Practical, Meaningful, and Actionable Ways for HR Professionals to Gain Business Experience and Acumen so that they can Truly Make an Impact as Business Partners?

CEOs overwhelmingly report that human capital is one of the leading growth enablers in the modern business world. Thus, in order to meet business goals, senior executives are increasingly holding HR departments accountable for delivering human capital results that are aligned to business strategy. However, as of 2014, 42% of non-HR business leaders believed that their HR teams were “underperforming” or “just getting by.” In agreement, less than 8% of HR leaders believed that their teams had the necessary skills to deliver the results that their counterparts were seeking. The perceived “unreadiness” of HR among business leaders is not only a U.S. phenomenon, but a global one as well. Executives in Japan, Germany, the UK, and China all recognize the problem, but doubt their company’s ability to respond (Appendix 1).11 For companies to effectively address this skills gap they must understand the causes behind the issue. They can then tackle the problem through two general avenues: 1. Adapting organizational design arrangements to better enable HR to work more closely with the business, and 2. Implementing traditional and nontraditional education/training initiatives

What Types of Predictive Analytics are Being Used in Talent Management Organizations?

[Excerpt] Talent management organizations are increasingly deriving insights from data to make better decisions. Their use of data analytics is advancing from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics is the most basic form, providing the hindsight view of what happened and laying the foundation for turning data into information. More advanced uses are predictive (advanced forecasts and the ability to model future results) and prescriptive (“the top-tier of analytics that leverage machine learning techniques … to both interpret data and recommend actions”) analytics (1). Appendix A illustrates these differences. This report summarizes our most relevant findings about how both academic researchers and HR practitioners are successfully using data analytics to inform decision-making in workforce issues, with a focus on executive assessment and selection

Product identification techniques used as training aids for analytical chemists

Laboratory staff assistants are trained to use data and observations of routine product analyses performed by experienced analytical chemists when analyzing compounds for potential toxic hazards. Commercial products are used as examples in teaching the analytical approach to unknowns