Graduate Certificate in Human Resources

We depend upon the law as well as ethics and common sense to help us make good decisions about issues surrounding employment that are routinely decided in workplaces every day. These issues can have devastating financial and productivity consequences if mishandled by the employer. Yet it seems as if few employers or their managers are equipped to handle them well. Employment law helps to regulate the workplace environment by protecting employees from dis­crimination and harassment, and providing a safer, fairer workplace where the rules provide for certain rights and responsibilities for both employees and employers alike. Those who choose to work in the business arena must understand basic legal concepts, plus have working knowledge of regulatory and compliance issues in order to effectively manage a business. In this course, students will analyze and evaluate legal concepts and learn to identify potentially troublesome employment-related legal and ethical issues in order to avoid liability as well as to develop an understanding of how to manage employees to maximize productivity.

Students will examine human resources develop­ment management processes from a strategic human resources perspective. Students will ana­lyze theories and practices as they relate to human and organizational development. The course will cover the evolution of human resource development (HRD) and the relationship between HRD and human resource management (HRM). Students will look at major internal and external factors that affect employee behavior, define learn­ing and how learning can be maximized, look at needs assessments and their purpose, write training objectives for a specific program, describe broad approaches to training design and delivery, define the evaluation methods used in HRD and their purposes, discuss the process of orga­nizational socialization beginning with employee orientation, identify and describe basic workplace competencies, define coaching and its tie to performance management systems, explain the need for employee counseling processes and their importance to employee wellness programs, and discuss career, management, and leadership devel­opment and the "new employment" relationship. The course defines organizational development and how planned-change models create intervention strategies to improve organizational effectiveness; and how changing demographics is creating a new, diverse, global workforce and the challenges in managing these new workers.

This course examines how an organization can leverage their reward systems to sustain, motivate, and retain its desired workforce to help achieve business objectives. The course focuses on the complex variety of pay structures within an organization and the relationship of those pay structures to organizational performance. Students will be exposed to major reward issues in the context of current theory, research, and real-business practices.

This course provides a solid foundation in the fundamentals of attracting, hiring, and assessing talent. It takes a closer look at the "war for talent" in the competitive marketplace today, and provides the impetus for more proactive and timely recruitment practices, effective and legally conscious selection methods, and valid assessment techniques. This course highlights the importance of refining talent-acquisition strategies as organizations and HR practitioners seek to improve the pipeline of new hire and job promotion candidates. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with multiple recruitment, selection, and assessment models and will synthesize these approaches from a talent management perspective.