How HR Offers Women Opportunities for Growth and Progression

According to a recent study, HR is a field that skews fairly heavily towards women, with around 71% of those polled being female. This balance is more even when we look at more senior roles – but in junior positions, the profession is dominated by women.

So, why is this? Why does the industry appeal to women, and what does it have to offer a would-be applicant of either sex?

The Growing Importance of People-Focused Careers

Businesses thrive when they attract and retain the right talent. This is especially true when it takes time and money to bring that talent to the required level. When staff turnover is high, the costs of starting from scratch with a new hire become extremely burdensome.

An HR professional can help to deal with this. A good HR department should scale along with the business. Ideally, it should expand before the business does. A business that aspires to grow in the right way will need to have good systems in place for recruitment, onboarding, and retention. That creates opportunities, first and foremost, for would-be HR recruits.

HR Offers a Variety of Career Paths

Everyone values flexibility. But it’s fair to say that, in general, women value it more than men. They’re more likely to take time out to spend time with their children, they’re more likely to switch careers midway through their lives, and they’re much more likely to work part-time.

HR is something that benefits from experience in a range of settings. If you understand a given job, then you might have insights into how to support other people who are doing that job. For example, if you’ve worked as a typist, then you might thrive as an HR professional who deals with office workers.

HR jobs are often filled by specialist recruiters with access to carefully curated pools of professionals. By making use of these organisations, you can put together an effective HR team, which will improve your efforts at recruitment more broadly.

Flexible Skills That Transfer Across Industries

If you’ve built up skills in other positions, then it might be that those skills can be easily applied in the world of HR. Communicating, coordinating teams, and solving interpersonal problems while keeping everyone happy: these are the skills required to thrive. This partly explains the dominance of women in HR, since they are more likely to possess these skills and the traits that support them. However, this doesn’t allow us to make assumptions about individual candidates based on trends in the populations to which they belong.

Of course, these skills are also very useful in other professions. Thus, progressing in the world of HR might allow you to easily transition to another niche later on.

Opportunities for Progression and Professional Development

The workplace of the future is likely to be characterised by continual change, driven mostly by technology. It’s therefore essential that new recruits be willing to learn new things over the course of their careers. Failure to do so might result in a person being left behind.

In some cases, an entry-level HR position might lead to a more senior and specialised role, perhaps at the executive level. But getting there will often mean picking up new skills along the way. Being willing and able to do the required learning is essential!

Conclusion

HR appeals to women in search of meaningful careers that revolve around other people. It’s a satisfying field to work in, and, in many cases, it’s also one that offers considerable scope for progression and personal development!