HRCP Blog

I spent a good part of the day yesterday reading and writing about employment branding. Here’s a bit of what I added to Unit 2: Workforce Planning and Employment of the HRCP Program:

As the labor market becomes increasingly competitive, employers apply strategies from marketing to help them compete for job applicants. Just as companies develop a recognizable brand to help position their products or services in the market, they attempt to “brand” themselves as an outstanding employer. Employment branding consists of projecting an image that makes people want to work for the company. This image is created through the company’s employment value proposition, another concept borrowed from marketing, which describes what the company has to offer its employees relative to the rewards offered by other places of employment.

When you think about it, getting your PHR or SPHR is a good step toward branding yourself as and outstanding employee. Being a certified human resource professional can strengthen your employee value proposition (yeah, I just made that up). It sets you apart as an individual with sufficient experience and knowledge to pass a comprehensive certification exam based on the vast body of knowledge that comprises the human resource field. So, if there is such a thing as employee branding, you’re on the right track.

As a school child, I liked spelling tests, which is strange considering the fact that I’m not a particularly good speller. I think what I liked about spelling tests was the absence of surprises. We had a list of words, and we were tested on our ability to spell those words. I was pretty good at memorizing, so I fared well in spelling despite my lack of natural ability in the area. Some questions on the PHR and SPHR exams are not so different from grade school spelling tests. We memorize facts and identify correct definitions or concepts on the exam.

The tough questions are the ones that ask for more than facts. And there are a lot of them. The items on the HRCI certification exams may be classified into three cognitive types:

1. Knowledge/Comprehension. These items are designed to assess your ability to recall facts or interpret a concept. (The “spelling test” questions.)
2. Application/Problem Solving. These items assess your ability to solve real-life problems by applying familiar principles or generalizations.
3. Synthesis/Evaluation. These items assess your ability to accurately and logically use critical judgments to combine distantly-related elements into a whole.

HRCI attempts to include items from the three cognitive types on the exams using the percentages shown in the following table:

Just as acing your spelling tests has limited usefulness until you’re able to put those words to use in sentences, the facts and knowledge you learn in preparation for the PHR or SPHR exam only get you part of the way there. You need to push yourself beyond the facts and into application and synthesis.

I’ve seen it time and time again: the nightmares, the flashbacks, the anxiety, and the absolute insistence that nothing they studied was on the PHR or SPHR exam. Okay, the nightmares and flashbacks might be a bit of an exaggeration, but many people who have recently suffered through taken the HR certification exam truly believe that what they studied had no correspondence with what they found on the actual exam.

I can understand the feeling. When I was in my early twenties, I lived in Honduras, Central America, for a year and a half. In preparation for my time abroad, I studied Spanish intensively for nine weeks, and I felt pretty confident in my ability to carry on basic conversations in the language. When I arrived in Honduras, however, I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. I thought, “Oh, no, they taught me the wrong language.” Of course, I soon found that I had, indeed, studied the right language, but I needed some time to adapt to the accent and the speed with with the people spoke. I had studied the right stuff. The application of the knowledge was the difficult part.

For many, their experience with the PHR and SPHR exam is similar. The exam seems to be written in a different language. There are more application questions than many test-takers are expecting. The “which of the following would you do first” and “which is the most important consideration” questions baffle even the most seasoned HR professional. In most cases, the topics are not unfamiliar and are included in any decent set of HR certification study materials. The oh-no-they-taught-me-the-wrong-language reaction is due to the nature of the exam questions. When we study, we tend to focus on facts. We review, we drill, we memorize, and we assess our progress by how much we can regurgitate. On the exam we are expected to be able to apply the facts.

True, there will almost always be some topics covered on the exam that we didn’t study. Every time I’ve taken the exam, I’ve been blindsided by one or more questions. In stressful situations, we tend to become fixated on, and remember, the difficult parts, while the easy stuff makes no lasting impression.

So, is there a treatment for HRCI post-traumatic stress disorder? Yes. It’s the same one that worked for me in Central America: hang in there. Fluency comes when facts and application meld.

Today, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting H-1B petitions for fiscal year 2008. Through the H-1B visa program, technology companies can seek permission from the U.S. government to hire temporary foreign employees. It is expected that 65,000 H-1B visas will be issued this year.

If you don’t see a question or two about the H-1B visa (or some other visa program) on your upcoming PHR or SPHR exam, I’ll be very surprised.

If you’d like to go right to the source for more information, here’s a link to the USCIS website.

Last year, Money magazine and Salary.com published a list of the 50 best jobs in America.  Human resource manager came in at number four, behind software engineer, college professor, and financial planner.  The article says that “HR is no longer about benefits administration and the employee newsletter. Those tasks are increasingly outsourced, and directors and v.p.s are considered strategic planners. Even lower-level managers are expected to design employee programs that also benefit the bottom line.”  Is it any wonder that beginning with the May-June 2007 test period “strategic management” will account for 29% of the SPHR exam?  That means that 58 of the scored questions on the SPHR exam relate to strategic management.  If I were preparing to take the SPHR exam this spring, I would study strategic management first  And I would study strategic management last.  Fifty-eight questions warrant a double dose of this functional area.

Who doesn’t love getting two for the price of one? Studying about learning styles in preparation for the PHR and SPHR exams is a two-for-one deal. First, you learn what you need to know about learning styles for the exam, and second, you identify your own learning style and how to better use your exam preparation time.

There are three basic kinds of learners: visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. Of course, people can (and must) learn in all three ways, but most individuals have one type of learning that works better for them. The following is taken from the HRCP Program (Unit 3 Human Resource Development).

Visual Learners—learn best through seeing

• Overhead transparencies
• Videos
• Diagrams

Auditory Learners—learn best through hearing

• Lectures
• Discussions
• Audio tapes

Kinesthetic Learners—learn best through touching

• Handling objects
• Constructing models

If you are primarily a visual learner, it may help you to study charts, diagrams, tables, and models. You may want to create your own summaries sheets or outlines of the concepts you are studying.

If you are an auditory learning, you would probably benefit from attending a class or participating in a study group. Hearing explanations and participating in discussions will help you understand and remember the material.

If you are primarily a kinesthetic learner, employing your preferred learning style into exam preparation is more difficult. Kinesthetic learners prefer to get their hands on things, to move around, to touch and manipulate objects. You might want to schedule frequent breaks into your study routine to take walks or engage in other satisfying physical activity.

There you go, two for the price of one. Wasn’t that at least as nice as getting a second green sweater or another tube of toothpaste?

The Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI) publishes Test Specifications, or a body of knowledge, upon which the PHR and SPHR exams are based. These specifications have been updated for 2007, and for the first time indicate that some content is “SPHR only” and some is “PHR only.” The Test Specifications list 74 “responsibilities” and 91 areas of “knowledge” that could be covered on the exams. Of these, 17 are listed as “SPHR only,” and just two are “PHR only.”

So, what does this mean to you if you’re preparing to take one exam or the other? Truthfully, not a lot. While the 17 “SPHR only” items represent about 10% of the list, they do not necessarily represent 10% of the exam content. Many of the 17 items are related, dealing with basically six issues: corporate structure, labor market, collective bargaining, executive compensation, training needs analysis & evaluation, and international HR. So, if you are studying for the PHR exam, you needn’t spend much time on those issues (although I wouldn’t neglect them entirely).

If you are studying for the SPHR exam, the two “PHR only” items (which deal with training performance evaluators and safety incentives and training) don’t do much to ease your study burden. Performance appraisal and safety are both important issues on the SPHR exam, and it would probably take more effort to avoid studying the “PHR only” items than it would to simply study the concepts in their entirety.

Knowing employment law is essential for passing the PHR and SPHR exams (not to mention for keeping your company out of hot water). While the text of the laws is important (however unintelligible), and the agency regulations are critical, decisions of the United States Supreme Court are paramount. The Court interprets laws and guidelines as cases are brought before them, and that is where the metaphorical buck stops. What the Supreme Court says, goes. Following is a discussion of how Supreme Court decisions have clarified disparate impact in age discrimination.

In the 2005 case, Azel P. Smith, et al., v. City of Jackson, Mississippi, the Supreme Court ruled that disparate impact theory can be used to press claims of age discrimination against employers similar to cases of race discrimination. The disparate impact theory allows plaintiffs to challenge an employer’s neutral practices if they have a disproportionately negative impact on persons over the age of 40. Such a legal challenge would be based upon a statistical analysis showing that the percent of individuals over age 40 who were harmed by the decision was greater than for those under age 40. However, the reach of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) is somewhat narrower than other discrimination laws since the ADEA allows employers to make decisions for reasonable factors other than age (RFOA), which could protect an employer’s decision if it was a reasonable nonage factor.

In a separate case, General Dynamics Land Systems Inc. v. Cline, the Supreme Court ruled that reverse discrimination does not violate the ADEA. Employers may treat older workers more favorably than younger workers without fear of violating the law.