HR Tweeps I Learn to Walk from.

Inspired by TheHRD I have too decided to produce a list of people who whether they know it or not made my blogging baby days and life of HRbeginner smoother. Thanks to these guys I am learning how to walk in the world of HR, Blogging, Twitter and generally developing my new me.

First of all it is Lis Wilson from HRconnexions UK 

giving me a good kick start in both blogging and job hunt. In my post Blog as a Job Hunt Tool I talk more about how my cooperation with Lis influenced my decision to make the blog, part of my “job hunt” strategy. Lis also seems to read my other posts and gives me feedbacks. Talking of feedbacks you should know that for blog toddler as I am there is never enough of praise if you only just learn to walk.

TheHRD  

and his blog inspired by J.P. Sartre's existentialism using quote "Hell is other people" to express the views most of us keep in our heads. This guy pulls it with little worries about what other people think, thanks to his anonymity to which some people have objections. Message to those who do have a problem with Mr.Incognito's model: TheHRD plays an important role in our HR sphere expressing things most of us do not dare to voice. He needs to protect himself from the human nature which tends to implement numerous biases in interaction with other people without looking for deeper meaning. We too have to protect the anonymity of TheHRD and hope for more of his wisdom coming out. 

MervynDinnen

for although I am sorry for him being in position of a jobseeker his courage to bring it up on his blog made me feel that I am not alone. Mervyn I know you very little (as everybody else's on this list) but from what other people say about you, you will get a job before the snow melts down.

Gareth Jones and Jon Ingham 

for their work in HR SoMe interaction and for setting up http://connectinghr.org/. Also for organising ConnectingHR tweetup for which I am looking forward to.

Laurrie Ruettimann 

and her blog PunckRockHR being first HR blog I came across with and have been big fun ever since. 

HRConnector, hrmagazine, PersonnelToday, TribunalWatch, TheEconomist 

for some great HR news tweets.

tedtalks 

for getting some smart people talking about what really matters. "Ideas worth spreading"

Ben Eubanks 

for he and his blog exists and gives me some idea what I would like to achieve with my blog. 

MJCarty 

 for his kindness in each of his tweets. Michael is real gentleman and keeps HR online community warm and cuddly.

Darren Rowse

aka problogger for as he himself says: "I blog about twitter and tweet about blogging. Sometimes I blog about tweeting about blogging and tweet about blogging about twitter." Great inspiration from this guy. 

Raina Kropp,

HR generalist from California for giving me very extensive feedback for my blog some time a go leading to some major changes. Thank you Raina and good luck with your study.

CBolam  

who's tweets taught me that my tweets needs to be from this world. Caroline is a HR Academic from whom I learned that there is more than just HR to tweet about. (among other things, as I was proudly lectured by Caroline at University).

There are indeed more and more influencers coming into my network as well as loads more work needs to be done for me to be able to walk, talk, run and being listened to. My last words have to go to whole HR community living in shadow of a business case. We do make a difference in people’s life’s and any manager thinking otherwise is a twat.  

For me to carry on growing I need you all around me.

Watch me and let me watch You. 

Thank you and subscribe/follow/comment.

Happy Christmas to you all

Where HR Beginner Sticks his Nose.

Time to share some of my most frequently used tools used in my continual professional development.
There are many more sources I have tried and keep trying and so should you.

I will indeed elaborate on all of the sources below in later posts, but firstly let's put them into nice list.


RSS feeds

Generally speaking the most frequently used tool to keep me up to date with all News, Websites and Blog posts updates as well as all job vacancies out there coming from online recruiters. If you haven't tried it yet put it on top of your list to make your development more efficient. I use Google Reader.I will share all my sources of feeds sometimes soon in the post about RSS feeds. Stay tuned and subscribe to my blog if you want to safe time researching it yourself.


The Economist,

I use audio edition, in my car while driving. Every Friday new weekly updates on current issues around the world. Excellently written by some excellent journalists.


Forums

CIPD Communities, HR Space etc. Reading it gives me a good idea what are the most current concerns and problems of HR professionals. Participating in discussions I practice my HR terminus technicus while getting some feedbacks on my critical HR thinking. An excellent way of developing the writing and thinking as a HR professional.

Networking

Blogs, Twitter, Linkedin are the must to keep me in touch with most influential people out there. When I have started to use twitter I was amazed by the amount of people willing to help and cooperate.

Academic Journals

Excellent for research. While Wikipedia is great to get a quick look on something quote it very sparingly. Academic journals hold some empirically supported materials where there is less guessing and more facts available. Try your local University library. There are some online libraries offering great selection of HR journals but the subscriptions are very expensive.

Final word

Don’t punish yourself for not being able to stick your nose in all of them at once. Make your own routine and make sure you stick your nose in each of the sources every now and then (ideally once a week). This will keep you moving and growing as a HR professional.

Hmm where to start...?

Hmm... wondering about my first words.
Hmm... still wondering...
...Huge frustration from another day of endless research about where to start and/or what to do next with my HR degree.
Bearing in mind importance of networking I try to keep up with as many social networks as possible. Meanwhile I realise that I could use some universal tool for accessing all of them at the same time.
Ooops my 4 years old laptop doesn’t keep up with my multitasking and I am ending up buying new computer. This time I go for desktop since performance in my case wins over mobility and price matters very much.
So now I am quick behind computer reorganising my outlook, developing state of art Google Reader to access all I need from one page while constantly coming across to new ideas about how to make myself as much efficient as possible.
From here it doesn’t take much for gadget freak as I am to try and transfer all possible applications related to my continual professional development to my windows mobile.
Furthermore reading CIPD book about Continual Professional Development while starting up my own CPD portfolio on CIPD website should help me to develop myself even further.
Also thinking about opening blog and become active member on HR forums.
That’s not all though. While having summer break from my MSC CIPD course at university I have also promised myself to hunt for a HR job since the one I have is focused too much on day to day operational issues. I have to admit however that I got enough support from fellow managers as well as from my superiors to apply my knowledge of HR. Since I got my HRM degree in February 2009 I had chance to run number of development projects leading towards raising standards and better performance of the workforce.
BUT I am still not perceived as a HR person (which is quite fair, considering the fact that organisation I work for can only afford one HR manager). This is exactly my problem though, while I spend considerable amount of time developing HR in workplace where it doesn’t count as my HR practice, how much of it will count when I will try and sell myself on HR job market?
So can you feel it? (If I didn’t put you of before these lines). While there is some negativity in my text I want to assure you that I still believe in bright future and in my environment I am percieved as a positive thinker.

Thus whatever you take from this article please don’t judge me for its messiness of random thoughts since this was a point of it at the first place. I have missed plenty of details about my job hunting issues in the middle of recession as well as too little time for my private life. Furthermore my doubts about my chances to succeed in good companies if I am not coming from prestigious university although I have secured myself 2.1. And what about the fact that I am not British and English is not my first language?
Blablabla, you can say and I agree with you in many ways, however this is a blog for all of you who have same mess at their start line in their HR career as I have.
Ps. Who knows? One day we will all share how did we go through it.
Good luck and heads up.