Lost in the reward career journey – who was meant to bring the compass? by Mark Childs

I spend almost half of my working life in the search market, seeking to identify and persuade reward professionals to consider an alternative career enhancing opportunity. The experience of the past five years has merely reinforced my perceptions of the reward specialism and I observe three big themes.

Firstly, and more by accident than design, I observe an ever growing body of reward practitioners who have little interest in gaining significant generalist experience. This bothers me. Perhaps I am troubled because I want to place reward practitioners who are in my image, having myself spent a decade working as a generalist, before then finding myself typecast in reward. More objectively, I sincerely believe that the best reward practitioners are those who can make the connections; possessing the necessary experience and insight to integrate reward and performance management with resourcing, talent, employee relations, HRIS, OD and the client facing business partner role.

Secondly, there are too few out there with a serious interest in building the capability of the reward specialism. It is just six years ago that CIPD launched the Advanced Certificate in Reward Management and while some 350 people have passed through this qualification  there remain few means of drilling deeper or building professional breadth other than workplace learning. It is not just external training and qualification which is lacking. The most pressing need of many of the candidates I meet is a desperate shortfall of careers advice, which contrasts unfavourably with the input I enjoyed from those who mentored me in my professional career. Too many reward practitioners are isolated professionals, who ought to be working with and for seasoned practitioners who can guide them in their career path, rather than leave them to the four winds of seemingly random and ill considered career choices that I often observe.

Lastly, the effect of the above two trends is to create an ever more troublesome bottle neck between Band 2 and 3 of the new HR Profession Map With an intensifying trend towards specialisation too early in their careers, we are witnessing too high a proportion of candidates ill equipped to transition from back office orientated transaction processing (for example. pay benchmarking, processing of the bonus review or the flexible benefits renewal) to that of a skilled influencer. This Band 3 thinking performer requirement, in which credibility depends on the ability to push back appropriately on line managers and other stakeholders, requires a degree of conceptual flexibility and personal work style which is not easily learned in solitary confinement.

What do you think?