Online Human Resource Courses, Certifications, Degrees & Free Materials: Some of the Many Choices
Introduction
As an HR professional you need to stay educated on a wide variety of topics. Perhaps sometimes you become aware of gaps in your knowledge when confronting specific difficult issues in your work.
Fortunately, these days, with the availability of online human resource courses, webinars, degree programs, and more, you need not leave your office to get the best and latest training from top experts, and your can even earn HR degrees and certifications without entering a classroom.
Topics of online human resource courses range from legal subjects such as employment discrimination, wage and hour law, and family & medical leave to practical HR topics such as employee discipline, compensation, payroll, employee investigations, and much more.
You Can Take SHRM Human Resource Courses
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has a variety of eLearning opportunities. Here are a few sample topics:
- The Increasingly Tangled Web of Immigration Law and Procedures
- Workplace Privacy in the Digital Era
- Strategic Planning for Maximum Performance
You can see some free demos of SHRM elearning human resource courses here.
And you can see the full catalog of SHRM elearning human resource courses here (each topic expands when you click its arrow).
One of the great things about many of these human resource courses is that they are short. You can learn a lot in just one or several hours!
You Can Supplement Your Human Resource Courses and Learning With Free Publications
Many companies offer free publications and white papers on human resource topics. The only price is they’ll usually try to get you on their e-mail list. You have to decide whether that bother is worth the gain in information. “Unsubscribe” is always an option if the email burden becomes too great.
Here are a few examples:
- Employee Evaluations: What Method Is Right For Your Organization?
- Unlock Employee Engagement with Real-Time Performance Management
- HR Best Practices: Delivering Strategic Value to the Enterprise
And here is a full catalog of freebies.
You Can Take Human Resource Courses That Prepare You For Professional Certification or Recertification
SHRM is one source of such certification-focused training.
SHRM has a PHR/SPHR (Professional in Human Resources/Senior Professional in Human Resources) Certification Prep course.
Finally, California has special human resource certifications, and SHRM has a prep course for those as well.
Another possibility is the Global Professional in Human Resources certification, for which SHRM also offers prep.
You Can Also Take Ivy League Quality Human Resource Courses Online For Degrees and Certifications
Of course, you might be thinking you’d like to be a bit more ambitious and take human resource courses online that can move you towards a degree, not just contribute to continuing professional education or certification. If so, you have many options. If you like an Ivy League name, and one known with a long history and tradition of labor and employee relations studies, online human resource courses from Cornell University are worth a look.
Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations is one of the top programs in the country. Indeed, it claims to be “the only institution of higher education in the United States to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in the interdisciplinary field of workplace studies.” That is jnot the same thing as a degree in human resource management, offered in several forms — undergraduate, masters, and certifications — at many institutions.
Villanova University is another well-know institution offering human resource courses online. You can pursue a Master of Science in Human Resource Development online or instead, for less time, effort, and money, choose a non-degree Master Certificate in Human Resources.
Penn State is yet another highly-regarded university offering online human resource courses, with a Master of Professional Studies in Human Resources and Employment Relations degree program that is designed for people already working in human resources or employment relations or those with a strong basic understanding of HR.
