21
September
2016
|
11:29 AM
America/Chicago

From the Inside Out HR Master’s Degree Resonates

From the Inside Out HR Master’s Degree Resonates

By Dan Silvia, Communications Manager

If you’re looking to make an impact on your organization – an impact that resonates from the inside out – there may be no better place to do that from than Human Resources. Bellevue University’s Master of Science in Human Resources Strategic Management has already had an impact on the University itself having been rated as one of the highest performing programs during an internal study.

Just two years old, the program produced its first crop of graduates in June 2016.

SONY DSCProfessor Angela Longe, director for both the graduate and undergraduate Human Resources programs, said the master’s degree program sprang rather naturally from the bachelor’s program.

“There was just so much more that I wanted to do,” she said. “There was a lot of opportunity to incorporate different subjects or go deeper into the various functional areas of HR. With the Master’s Program, we also had the opportunity to expand into global HR as well as focus more on the strategic aspects of HR.”

The program examines the responsibilities of a human resources leader, with emphasis on becoming a strategic partner with executives and departments within an organization. You will learn how analytics can be developed, analyzed, and utilized to support and promote human capital and other organizational initiatives and investments.

Areas of study include:

  • Organizational Effectiveness
  • HR Metrics and Evaluation
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • Globalization of our Workforce
  • Talent Management
  • Total Rewards
  • Strategic Business Partnerships
Longe was quick to praise her adjuncts and course designers who helped put the program together and keep it running on all cylinders.

“Megan Berry Barlow is the Director of Human Resources at Nebraska Furniture Mart. She’s spent a lot of time in compensation and benefit and wrote the curriculum for those courses,” Longe said.

Adjunct instructor Robin Van Hove, who just completed a global integration of Human Resources Information Systems for Valmont, designed the curriculum MSHR 620 Contemporary Issues. Katrina Collum, a Senior Organizational Development Specialist for HCA, co-developed the MSHR 645 Human Resource Metrics, Evaluation course, and April Strong, a VP of HR at National Pharmaceutical Services (now a VP of Operations at the same organization) co-developed MSHR 650 Strategic Business Partnerships.  Professor John Patterson, who holds a law degree from Taft Law School in Santa Ana, California, wrote the curriculum for MSHR 605 Human Resource Law.

Longe also singled out Course Designer Marshall Peterson for special praise.

“Marshall Peterson is just phenomenal,” she said. “He’s creative, very efficient and overall, just a pleasure to work with.   He made my job so much easier and we have a strong program because of him.”

Longe is partial to the Capstone course MSHR 655. In that course, all the previous information comes together as students prepare a strategic plan for an HR department.

“They’ll have a very robust knowledge in each one of the functional areas like recruitment and selection, employee and labor relations, compensation and benefits, metrics. It all comes together,” Longe said. “They’ve had this very detailed look at all the functions within their organization. Armed with this knowledge they apply it to a business challenge and determine what HR initiatives they recommend and how they will evaluate how successful their initiatives were.”

The program was developed to meet all the specifications of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

“Bellevue University actually became an education partner with SHRM.” Longe said. “I had this wonderful opportunity to really go in and do that double check to make sure that our program and what we taught, what we thought was important, was aligned and consistent with what SHRM thought was important.”