Study Human Resource Management at Otago

Cecilia Foster:

Hi, my name is Cecilia and I study Human Resource Management here at Otago. What I love about this subject is the group work we get to do, so it’s really hands-on work. I get to take the theory I’ve learnt in class and apply that practically. I love about the subject that you get leadership skills and people management skills which are transferable in any job role that I want to go into.

This subject has really inspired me to help businesses and encourage them to invest in their people, so I aspire to be an HR manager in the future.

Dr Paula O'Kane:

So my name is Paula O'Kane and I am the course director for the BCom major in Human Resource Management. Human Resource Management at Otago has been around for about three or four years as a major, but we taught a lot of those subjects prior to the major being introduced.

Students who study HRM at Otago do a lot of practical experiences. So we have a negotiation paper that is intense that allows people to really understand what negotiation's about. We bring in lots of speakers and we really work together to bring students in and to understand them and to get to know them.

We also are closely aligned with the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand, so we bring speakers in from there, we use their resources and we’re really engaged with that practitioner community.

Another key benefit of HRM Otago is that we really engage with our alumni network. We use them to mentor our students, to provide job opportunities, and really engage and make them enjoy the course and bring people together, as we do as a subject for Human Resource Management.

Human Resource Management at Otago gives people really great transferrable skills. We focus a lot on communication skills, whether that’s presentations — which we know people at the time perhaps don’t really enjoy — but when they go out into the workplace having those skills is absolutely beneficial. We get that feedback constantly from our graduates.

Their written communication skills are really developed as well, and then the knowledge much more generally of Human Resource Management is extremely well grounded. We practice evidence-based Human Resource Management, so we get students to go to the literature but also to practitioner reports to bring information together so they can make really good and signed decisions whenever they think about what they’re going to do for HR in the workplace.

We really encourage people to come together to form close-knit teams, to really work as teams within HRM at Otago, and then whenever they go out into the big bad world out there, we have lots of networks already built. So you have your own alumni, you have the people that you have met through university that really helps you build your career in HR.