19 June 2024 - 10 min read
At this stage in your HR journey, you’ve probably found yourself drawn to the wonderful world of job adverts.
If you have, it’s likely that you’ve started to come across one of the fiercest debates raging in the field: which is the better attribute for a candidate targeting a role to have – HR experience or a specific HR qualification?
In this blog, we’re going to explore everything you need to know about this debate.
What exactly do you need to know about qualifications and experience when it comes to building your CV and defining your USPs? How can you balance and align the two? And which one is ultimately the best to have?
First up, let’s look at qualifications and what they can add to your appeal as a candidate – or your unique selling points (USPs) as they’re often named.
Qualifications are essentially a way of showing that you have a particular set of skills and knowledge at a particular level of complexity.
HR qualifications are usually created by organisations known as professional membership bodies. These are membership organisations made up of professionals working in the HR and L&D fields, and they are responsible for ensuring that high standards are maintained in the profession. They do that through focusing on the professional development of people working in the field. One of the most effective ways to do that is to ensure that everyone is learning the same things to the same standard and that means creating qualifications which can act as a benchmark.
The most popular qualifications in the HR field are offered by organisations like:
There are a huge range of Human Resources qualifications available which can make it hard to decide which to study first.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (also known as the CIPD) is one of the leading professional membership bodies for the HR field. CIPD have developed a range of qualifications, spanning all levels of an HR career, to help them ensure that HR professionals have the skills and knowledge that employers are looking for.
Widely regarded by employers worldwide, CIPD qualifications are often a required element for many HR roles. This can make studying one a good investment for your career, teaching you essential HR concepts and skills whilst also potentially improving your chances of success when applying for particular jobs. We offer CIPD qualifications at DPG, so we know a fair bit about them. As a result, we’ll use CIPD qualifications as an example of a typical HR qualification in this blog.
CIPD qualifications are divided into three types:
Foundation Certificates are entry-level qualifications, equivalent to Level 3. Associate Diploma qualifications are the next step up and are at an intermediate level, equal to Level 5. Advanced Diplomas are the highest CIPD qualification that you’ll be able to study and they’re equivalent to Level 7 in difficulty.
There are a range of ways that you can study professional qualifications. Three of the most popular are:
Each format has its own pros and cons and each is suited to different learning styles and different needs.
In-person study is one of the traditional forms of professional education. In this way of studying a qualification, you’ll attend an in-person class regularly (usually once a week or a few times a month) in a classroom with other students. Your learning will be led and directed by a tutor who will decide the pace at which you learn and you’ll work through each section of the qualification in sequence.
Online study is a digital evolution of distance-learning. Instead of attending a physical classroom to work through your course, you’ll simply access it online and work through the content at your own pace, in your own time, wherever you want. With online learning, you’ll need to be motivated and a good self-starter. It will be your responsibility to make sure that you work through your course materials (although you’ll usually have access to an online tutor or online resources for basic support and to answer questions).
Hybrid learning is a combination of in-person learning and online learning. It can take many forms, but it’s made up of at least elements of learning in person with others and elements of working through course material online, in your own time.
The demands of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a huge growth in professionals studying their qualifications online. Now, a few years on, online qualifications are still just as popular.
So, we’ve explored the basic concept of qualifications – what they show your employer, what they can give you etc. – above. Let’s have a look at some of the specific CIPD HR qualifications that you could choose to study.
CIPD qualifications are widely regarded as one of the most versatile types of HR qualification on the market, respected and recognised by employers around the world. Here are some of the most popular:
Duration: Around 7 to 9 months
Typical cost: Around £2,000
The CIPD Level 3 Foundation Certificate in People Practice is one of the most important qualifications that you’ll ever study in Human Resources. It provides the backbone to your professional practice and many people find that it forms the foundation of their HR skills overall.
This qualification is designed for people who are at the very start of their HR careers, and for those with little to no experience of working in the field. It’s ideal if you want to develop an overview of the essential HR skills and knowledge you’ll need for entry-level roles from scratch. This makes it a popular choice with people coming into the HR field for the first time.
On the CIPD Level 3 qualification, you’ll study modules like these:
Once you’ve studied this qualification, you’ll be able to apply for entry-level HR roles, like:
Employers are increasingly looking for candidates who can demonstrate a foundation qualification in HR like this, so studying one can be a useful asset to have. Once you’ve successfully completed the Level 3 qualification, you’ll be eligible to move on to further study like the CIPD Level 5 Associate Diploma in People Management.
Duration: Around 12 to 15 months
Typical cost: Around £4,000
The CIPD Level 5 Associate Diploma in People Management is an intermediate qualification that’s aimed at people who have a few years of experience under their belts, who are looking to progress to more challenging roles. Usually a CIPD Level 5 qualification is required for many types of HR management roles, so it’s a good investment to make if you want to target more senior positions.
It’s likely to be more of a challenge to complete than the Level 3, representing a significant step up in terms of difficulty.
You’ll study a range of core modules and get to choose one elective module yourself.
Core modules
Elective modules (choose one)
Bear in mind that elective modules – where you get to pick what topic you study – vary between different providers, so what’s available with one particular provider might not be available with another.
Usually a CIPD Level 5 Associate Diploma in People Management will take you around 15 months to complete, Once you’ve completed it, you can expect to be able to apply for intermediate roles like:
Duration: Around 18 to 24 months
Typical cost: Around £7,000
The CIPD Level 7 Advanced Diploma in Strategic People Management is the most challenging HR qualification that you’ll be able to complete with CIPD. It’s equivalent to Masters degree level study in terms of its difficulty and it’s aimed at professionals with a significant range of experience and expertise who are looking to advance to more senior, strategic roles in the HR field.
Once you’ve studied this qualification, you’ll be eligible to apply for Chartered Membership of the CIPD – a prestigious industry accolade that recognises you as a distinguished HR professional.
This qualification explores the more strategic side of Human Resources management, looking at how leaders can shape the direction of HR and influence strategy in an organisation.
In the CIPD Level 7, you’ll study seven core modules and then choose one elective module to study:
Core modules
Elective modules (choose one)
Taking around 24 months to complete, by the end of your Level 7 study you could be a strong candidate for roles like:
Qualifications are used as benchmarking tools by employers – they are a simple way of assessing whether or not you have a particular level of skills and knowledge.
Think of a qualification as something similar to a driving license. A driving license shows someone that you have the competency and skill, up to a particular level, to be able to legally drive a car. A qualification shows an employer that you have a particular set of knowledge and skills, gained up to a certain complexity, in a particular subject. Both are used as a way of validating your ability to do a particular thing – in the case of driving, your ability to safely operate a car; in the case of a qualification, that you understand a specific set of information and have a specific set of skills, in Human Resources.
One of the beauties of the CIPD framework of qualifications is that they’re designed to interact with one another. They form a pathway that you can follow over the course of your career in HR, enabling you to level up your skills based on the complexity of the HR role that you’re targeting. This means that you’ll be able to follow a path up the career ladder from the very beginning of your career, at Level 3 through to intermediate Level 5 and senior positions at Level 7.
Ultimately, this can help you to save time when it comes to building your career, eliminating the need for you to research which qualification to study next.
As useful as they can be, there’s no getting around the fact that qualifications cost money – and that they can often cost significant amounts of it.
With the typical Level 3 qualification coming in at over £1,000, HR qualifications can represent a significant outlay in most budgets. This only gets more expensive, the further up the career ladder you climb. You can offset some of the cost based on the study choices you make, like choosing to study online or part-time, or spreading the cost of tuition over monthly payments, for example. That said, you’ll still need access to some fairly hefty amounts of money initially for a deposit.
Gaining work experience can often be significantly cheaper than HR qualifications. After all, you usually don’t need to pay an employer to get work experience because you’re essentially a free source of labour.
HR experience is pretty self-explanatory as a concept. It’s simply experience that you have gained from working in a Human Resources-specific context. There are a variety of ways that you could gain this type of experience:
Experience doesn’t have to be gained in fancy contexts to be worthwhile – you don’t have to have been a personal assistant to the head of HR at a multinational corporation, for instance, to use it as a USP on your CV. Any form of HR experience, in any context, is something that you should be shouting about – especially when it comes to securing your first proper HR role.
Prior work experience of a role is probably one of the most valuable attributes that you can have on your CV. Resources and time are naturally tight in most workplaces, so employers want to be able to save these by ensuring that the people they employ don’t need extensive training to be able to do their jobs well. At face value, holding previous work experience shows an employer that you are familiar with the demands of work and that you can cope with all of the unique stresses and requirements of working in a team and independently in a HR context.
So, to put it even more bluntly, work experience essentially shows employers that you know what work is like – and that you won’t be too out of your depth in the workplace.
This experience doesn’t even need to be specifically ‘HR-focused’ either. Transferable experience, where you’ve worked in a role that used skills similar to what you would use in a HR context, are useful things to highlight on your CV.
One of the main ways that work experience benefits you is the fact that it gives you first-hand insight into the type of skills and knowledge that you’ll need in HR roles.
The CIPD, for instance, argues that work experience is a powerful way of giving you an understanding of the way that a HR department works, equipping you with an insight into what it's really like working in specific roles, as well as helping you to develop your skills and confidence. This can be a good opportunity to identify the relevant skills that you already have and those that you need to develop to stand the best chance of success in your career development.
Ultimately, having work experience shows an employer that you are already familiar with what it’s like working in a professional context.
This sounds like a slightly strange thing at first, particularly if you’ve never had a full-time or a part-time job before. Why would that be important? Surely the world of work isn’t that different to the world of study?
Well, if you’re coming into it for the first time, the workplace can be a bit of a culture shock. It can take a while for you to adjust to the rhythms and unique stresses of it. This is reflected in the attitude of a number of employers when it comes to hiring staff.
Some employers can be naturally risk-averse when it comes to hiring employees. After all, recruitment is a costly process, so they want to make sure that the money and resources they invest in the process is worth it. In other words, they want to ensure that they end up with a candidate filling the position who is worth the initial investment and who is likely to stick around for a while. This means that, sometimes, they can be wary of hiring people without much professional experience.
Ultimately, practical HR experience shows that you’re already familiar with what it’s like to work and that you’re capable of coping with the demands of a similar role.
As we’ve outlined above, gaining work experience will give you an opportunity to explore a typical HR role and actually observe what professionals in them actually do on a day-to-day basis. This can help you practice the skills that you’ll be relying on every day when you’re working in your HR position.
Practice is key to building your confidence, and confidence is key when it comes to helping you fulfill your true potential as a professional, affecting everything from the quality of your decision-making through to your resilience. Taking the opportunity to build it now will help prepare you for all the exciting challenges that you’ll experience in your HR career.
Sometimes, if you focus entirely on learning as you work on the job, you can find that there are gaps in your knowledge. That’s only natural. After all, learning on the job can sometimes seem a bit jumbled. That’s due in part to the fact that you’re just learning the things about HR that you need to know to do your role well, and you’re just learning about them as they arise.
Work experience is primarily practical too. That means that you might struggle to gain a detailed understanding of the theory behind particular working practices, skills or techniques.
As qualifications are designed with the needs of employers in mind, they are generally designed to provide as comprehensive an overview of HR as possible. This means that, whilst some things you cover might not be particularly relevant to your current role, the overall qualification will give you an overview of the broad range of theory and skills that are used in your industry.
In truth, HR qualifications are not inherently any better than HR experience when it comes to building an impressive CV. And vice-versa too – HR experience is not any better than having a HR qualification on its own.
In reality, the most accomplished (and ultimately successful) professionals will be those that have a varied skillset (evidenced by high quality qualifications) and relevant experience working in Human Resources-focused roles (shown by previous jobs or work experience that you have). An effective combination of the two will be something that employers will be looking for when trying to find the right candidates for positions. As a result, it’s best to try and gain a mixture of both qualifications and experience when you’re trying to develop your HR career and gain your first HR role.
It can help to take a ‘Goldilocks’ approach, finding a roughly equal balance between the two that enables you to show employers you have the benefits of both types of experience by:
Ultimately, the best candidates for roles are those who can combine the two. Qualifications need to be tethered to experience, and experience needs to be tethered to qualifications. The two are ultimately dependent on each other in a kind of symbiotic relationship – they both get their meaning and their power from each other.
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