What you'll learn

Skills you'll gain

Specialization - 5 course series

The projects apply the knowledge learned to specific work groups of your choosing (e.g., your own work team). You will learn how to proactively identify key challenges around staffing, performance management, and compensation and then use this to construct strategies and plans for addressing these challenges in the context of your chosen work group.

One way or another, all employees are managed. But approaches to managing employees varying from employee-to-employee, job-to-job, manager-to-manager, organization-to-organization, and country-to-country. This course provides a foundation for developing your own approach to skillfully managing employees by illustrating alternative human resource management (HRM) strategies, introducing the importance of the legal context, and thinking about what motivates employees. This will then give you the factual and conceptual basis for developing specific, critical HRM skills in subsequent courses on hiring employees, managing performance, and rewarding employees. Don't know anything about HRM? That's OK! Leave this course with a new-found understanding of the range of options available for managing employees, a grasp of what makes workers tick, and the readiness to develop your own HRM skills.

At the outset of the course we will explore the importance of linking recruitment goals with overall company strategy. We then look at a number of options to recruit and select employees both effectively and legally. Throughout the course we will examine current issues in talent acquisition, such as how companies are now leveraging social media and hiring analytics to ensure better quality hires. At the conclusion of the course, we look at how to onboard employees to promote employee commitment and engagement.

In this third course in the Human Resources for People Managers specialization, we will discuss the skills and key processes you will need to develop your employees to attain department and organizational goals. These skills will include setting clear expectations, providing positive and corrective feedback, and delivering an effective performance appraisal.

We begin by asking: "To succeed, what kind of a person does your organization need to attract, retain, and motivate?" From there, we'll explain how to align your organization's objectives, its pay philosophy, and ultimately the way it designs and implements its salary structure, short-term incentives, long-term incentives, and benefits. Interested in learning more about the technical aspects of compensation, but don't know where to begin? We'll give an overview of key the key technical skills: compliance with pay regulations, understanding stock options, shopping for health insurance and pension providers, and designing incentive plans. Lastly, we'll discuss non-monetary methods of motivating employees. Upon completing the course, you should be able to have an understanding of compensation both strategically and technically. Learners will also gain introductory familiarity with pay regulation in the US.

This specialization provides a robust introduction to the key principles, policies, and practices of human resource management, with a focus on understanding managerial choices and constraints, acquiring and onboarding talent, managing employee performance, and rewarding employees. The capstone project provides learners with the opportunity to apply these key principles and practices to a real-world workplace (including a learner's own workplace if desired). Specifically, the capstone project will involve identifying the key human resources challenges for a workplace--including the most pressing motivational, selection, performance evaluation, and reward issues. And for each of these areas, learners will devise a multi-step action plan for addressing the challenges identified.

Recruiting, Hiring, and Onboarding Employees

Managing Employee Performance

Managing Employee Compensation

Human Resources Management Capstone: HR for People Managers