Curriculum and Courses

Essential Skills

A comprehensive understanding of the integral role of HR/LR in organizations and the tools to become leading professionals

HR/LR strategies that yield superior performance and positive outcomes for employees require a complex set of strategic analyses and assessments of day-to-day policies and practices. Critical to success is learning to effectively manage the most valuable and most complex resources of organizations – human resources.

Making strategic analyses of the global environment

Achieving competitive advantage in today’s dynamic global marketplace begins with assessments of the environmental contexts that organizations face, including:

• Emerging global patterns in trade, investment, and sourcing
• Diversity of workplace systems, cultures, and operational systems across borders

Our students learn how to make these strategic analyses and how to create global mindsets throughout organizations.       

Aligning HR/LR strategies with business strategies

Paramount to competitiveness is the alignment of HR/LR strategies with market-positioning, financial, technological, and operational strategies. Our curriculum prepares students to make assessments and decisions about alternative HR/LR systems designed to achieve organizations’ business and employee outcome goals. 

Estimating the value added from HR/LR practices

Increasingly, HR/LR professionals are called on to make the business case for policies and practices pursued. Our students learn how to use HR metrics and statistical methods to estimate the value added to performance from HR/LR practices.

Developing HR/LR strategies, policies, and practices

Effective formulation and execution of HR/LR strategies, policies, and practices require in-depth and wide-ranging expertise as well as a full-systems approach to organizational learning, innovation, change, and leadership.

Among primary HR/LR policies and practices are:

• Selection and staffing
• Compensation and benefits
• Development and training
• Work design
• Collective bargaining

Students learn how to design and integrate these policies and practices with the application of new technologies and management processes to create high-performance workplace systems. 

Complying with employment and labor laws

All HR/LR professionals must understand principles of employment and labor laws in order to evaluate the legal implications of various employment policies and practices, uphold the legal rights and responsibilities of employees and managers, and make sound workplace decisions. 

Our students gain expertise in a wide range of laws and policies, including – for example – those governing:

• Equal employment opportunity
• Occupational injury and illness
• Employee rights to privacy
• Drug and alcohol screening
• Rights to union representation
• Good faith bargaining

Managing the dynamics of union-management relations

Union representation, whether in the U.S. or abroad, changes the dynamics of the employment relationship. Understanding the strategic and practical implications of union-management relations is essential to those in leadership roles in HR/LR. Our program ensures that all students receive a solid grounding in collective bargaining and labor-management relations, making them highly valued and versatile professionals. For those seeking to focus their careers in collective bargaining, whether as representatives for unions or employers, our curriculum offers a full array of essential electives.

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