- Corporate Importance of HR
- Employee Retention Strategies
- Diversity in the Workplace
- Worker Evaluation and Feedback Cycle
- Common HR Challenges
Before fulfilling all of the requirements needed to graduate, most students seeking a master’s degree in human resources will need to complete a capstone project. These are fairly complex and lengthy engagements that require in-depth research, analysis, and reporting on a specific, pre-approved topic. So, what are some of the best topics that could be explored?
1. Corporate Importance of HR
Looking into the importance of the human resource department to the company’s overall standing or performance is a great idea for a capstone project. This is because it has all the necessary criteria needed to make an outstanding report. First, it allows the student to conduct a large amount of research since this question is fairly common in the market. Then, it makes it easy to obtain first-hand insight from current HR operatives who can comment on the matter. Finally, it is easy to quantify as it can be depicted via productivity or even salary figures.
2. Employee Retention Strategies
According to Forbes, employee retention issues could lead to a long-term lack of talented workforce and higher hiring competitiveness in the market. For the unfamiliar, the retention of workers is defined as the firm’s ability to keep the same employees around for as long as possible. A lot of workplaces often fail to do so and see high employee turnover. A capstone project focused on this area could dissect the reasons why people leave their jobs and how such issues can be prevented. After all, most high-level HR leaders will have to answer similar questions as a part of their job.
3. Diversity in the Workplace
With the rise of globalization, one of the trends that has infiltrated into practically every industry on the planet is diversity. Just consider, for instance, the number of individuals who might be working somewhere far from home. The upbringing has fallen to the very bottom of the list of things that employees can consider when hiring someone. Instead, they are legally mandated to simply focus on the applicant’s skills and experiences. So, someone finishing their master’s degree in human resources with a capstone project on this topic could analyze assimilation strategies and intercultural communication.
4. Worker Evaluation and Feedback Cycle
One of the leading reasons for employees’ lack of abilities that are needed to do basic job duties in the absence of formal training and evaluation. Usually, the evaluation part of the process is missing as companies often do not have formal guidelines requiring everyone to be reviewed and given feedback. Fortunately, this gives HR students a great topic that could explore issues such as lack of guidance that facilitates high burnout rates. Burnout causes employees to quit. After all, both of those could cause a significant drop in the company’s success.
5. Common HR Challenges
Finally, one could always look into some of the most common challenges that are faced by the HR workers. These can include an overview of problems such as:
- lack of internal controls
- high employee turnover
- sky-rocketing dissatisfaction rates
Thus, the overall length of the project will not be too troublesome. The student can break down the engagement into a few different sub-sections with varying goals. Not to mention that doing research and first-hand interviews on these issues could be very interesting.
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Of course, the list of great ideas goes on as the HR field is extremely broad and accounts for dozens of different job duties. Nonetheless, those finishing up a master’s degree in human resources and in need of a capstone project idea should look over the previously described five.