A career spent learning and teaching others about the “profession” of HR.
Starting this month, 50 students will be embarking on a unique academic journey.
They will be among an elite group of Canadian students who will graduate with a degree in human resources management.
The first-ever graduates of the Bachelor of Human Resource Management at York University in Toronto will be exposed to three-years of intense liberal and HR-specific education. Students who choose to complete the four-year honour program will take courses like strategic HR, international HR and career management.
It’s a long way from the days when personnel departments were staffed with people who “fell into” the profession without any formal academic or job-related training. Today, future practitioners have a clear path to get somewhere in HR.
And, it’s thanks in large part to Canadian HR pioneer Monica Belcourt.
When the government of Ontario was handing out money for innovative new academic programs, Belcourt leaped at the opportunity.
“The bachelor degree is an absolute dream degree,” gloats Belcourt in her second-floor office in the Atkinson College building, overlooking the sprawling York campus.
“We’ve reached the stage now. You have a degree in nursing, a degree in accounting. The profession has reached the point where there is enough academic content and demand for the graduates that this degree is worthwhile for everyone,” says Belcourt.
In addition to the undergraduate degree, and two successful HR-certificate programs, next fall York will also introduce one of Canada’s unique graduate programs in human resource management.
Before taking a teaching position at York, Belcourt notes that there were only two HR courses. Today, some 15 years later, York has one of the largest full-time HR teaching staff with five professors and 15 part-time professors, 20 HR courses and more than 150 students majoring or honouring in HR.
“What Monica has done is develop and build the best HR program in Canada. What she’s done is build a great faculty with amazing output and reputation,” says colleague Alan Saks, HR professor at York.
Getting the undergraduate and graduate degrees launched were just two accomplishments in a “grand plan” that has been in the making for more than 20 years. That grand plan is to bring HR to the level it has been aspiring to for years, through research, academic support, certification and ultimately licensing.
Considered one of the leading Canadian HR thinkers, Belcourt has had a tremendous impact on the profession. She drives to push HR research and to bring it to students and practitioners. She’s authored and co-authored leading Canadian textbooks in the field and has elevated HR in the academic community through sponsored research and grants. Ultimately, her greatest goal is to get HR the respect and recognition it deserves.
“The grand plan is to make HR a profession. In fact that’s been my professional life’s work. There is a body of knowledge out there and students and practitioners should know it exists.”
Belcourt herself happened into HR by “absolute luck and chance.”
After graduating with a psychology major from the University of Manitoba in her hometown of Winnipeg, Belcourt was recruited into the administrative trainee program by the federal government and put into a “personnel” position in Ottawa.
“That was my first exposure to personnel. I didn’t even know what it was then,” shrugs Belcourt, recounting her youthful naivete.
She stayed with the federal government for six years as a personnel officer and during that time, with a zest for knowledge and learning, completed two graduate degrees, one in adult education from the University of Ottawa and the other in organizational psychology from York. During that time she also married Michael, her husband of 30-years.
It was about that time when she realized the lack of learning resources available for HR practitioners.
“When I started there were no books or courses I could take to learn more about HR. While my friends whom had taken marketing and business had so many courses available to them I had nothing. Even when I went back to do graduate studies, I had no access to HR courses.”
When she completed her last graduate degree, the federal government placed her in the Career Assignment Program for “those that had the potential to move rapidly into management.” And that’s how she landed the top HR position with CP Rail in Montreal.
“It was a huge jump. It was scary. Like every entrepreneur says, ‘If I’d known what I was getting into I wouldn’t have done it.’ But, it was a tremendous experience for me. It was a huge opportunity to learn about HR and contribute.”
As director of a 10-member personnel department and with some 63,000 employees under her watch, Belcourt learned the value of HR and the need to keep proving that value to senior executives.
“When you’re introducing a program you’d better be prepared to explain to people at the senior levels how you’re going to spend the money and what benefit you’re going to give them. Can you talk generically about the benefits or can you talk specifically about the benefits? That was the biggest lesson I learned at CP,” says Belcourt.
With two years at the helm of CP’s personnel department, Belcourt took leave to have her first son. When she returned to the working world, she took a job with the former federal Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs as manager of consumer affairs. Since the job required her to be bilingual, she spent two months learning how to speak and write in French. Before she knew it she was dreaming in French. After two years, she resigned her post to have her second child but continued teaching organizational behaviour courses part-time at Concordia University.
When she returned to full-time work, she took a job as director of training and development for the National Film Board. It was in this post that she decided she wanted to go back to school again, this time for her doctorate in business. She went back to Concordia to teach HR full-time and enrolled in the business PhD program at McGill University. She also taught HR at French-speaking Universite du Quebec au Montreal.
Her family decided to leave Quebec for Toronto, where they had better access to services for their severely handicapped daughter. Her daughter died at nine years old.
Working, going to school and raising children was hard work but she had a support network and a nanny (whom she dedicated a book to) to help.
“I remember one Friday night putting the kids to bed at 8:30 p.m., exhausted of course and opening my statistics book and doing statistics problems for five hours and that was my life.”
Her husband, then president of Polo Ralph Lauren Canada, was supportive and extremely helpful. She also gave up her private consulting firm so she could be home more often.
“My husband is incredible. He gives so much. I would have hated to make a choice between my career and my family. Both have been incredibly exciting for me.”
With her PhD still to complete and the family moving to Toronto, she took a job at York teaching HR. Her third child, a son, was born soon after the move.
“Despite all my job hopping every two years, I’ve actually been at York now for 15 years,” says Belcourt, her doctorate degree hanging proudly on her office wall.
It was in her new teaching role that she began to realize how poorly HR was fairing in Canada.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto to teach HR specifically that I began to think how could we teach HR when we have no Canadian books, no Canadian research. The need for Canadian books was just so apparent,” explains Belcourt.
The same frustration was playing out in the provincial HR association. Belcourt had joined the Human Resource Professionals Association of Ontario (HRPAO) and soon became involved in the group’s drive towards certification. Belcourt points out that while HRPAO members had to take courses in order to be certified, they didn’t have access to Canadian material.
“The textbooks we were all using were American. That put us at professional risk because the Americans not only have a different worldview on how to handle HR issues, some of the information is also wrong and irrelevant in the Canadian context.”
She was inspired to write and edit a series of HR books for ITP Nelson that today total six, including Strategic Human Resources Planning, Managing Performance Through Training and Development. Four more are to be added and most are already into their second editions.
“It’s one way of bringing to students, who will ultimately be practitioners tomorrow, Canadian perspectives, Canadian laws, Canadian practices, facts, so we don’t put them at professional risk. They can learn about what the best companies in Canada are doing. At the same time, it’s not only Canadian content, it’s also offering them international perspectives.”
Today, Belcourt is on the board of directors and HRPAO representative on the National Capabilities Committee of the Canadian Council of Human Resources Association, which sets the standards for certification of HR professionals across the country. She takes pride in her work with HRPAO and NCC in getting the provinces uniformed in terms of certification.
Convincing other associations to adopt a more rigorous approach to certification that focused on knowledge primarily and experience second was difficult but Belcourt says it was a struggle worth fighting. Convincing people HR was more of science than an art was difficult but “this is the way it had to go,” repeats Belcourt.
While she does understand the frustration some feel about certification, she’s been a firm supporter of the process and thinks in the coming decade the profession will move inline with other professions and require practitioners to be licensed.
“I think what’s happened in HR is that people who have certain skill sets have been successful to a certain degree in the past. What I think has happened is that people in their 40s and 50s have not recognized that there is a huge body of knowledge out there and that there is a more efficient way of learning than learning through trial and error or anecdotally.”
She adds: “It’s the classic HR joke. ‘I’ve had 20 years experience, two years times 10.’ People say ‘I’ve been working for 20 years and I’ve been doing it and it works. Our graduates will be able to say, ‘It works and this is how it works and why.’
“The thought of some amateur HR person playing with terminating 3,000 people and doing it wrong is terrifying. We need licensing almost more than accountants or engineers because we impact peoples’ lives directly,” stresses Belcourt.
Human resources has changed tremendously since the days in the federal government when Belcourt was processing terminations and posting jobs.
“I think the major way HR has changed is now it is seen as a contributor, that HR programs and practices really do make a difference. That they are not just spending money without any benefit in return. HR wasn’t a profession and now it is,” says Belcourt.
It’s become more of a strategic player and she’s pushing that message forward, starting with her students.
“Without a doubt these students will have the ability to understand how organizations operate generally. They will have to have this knowledge as HR takes on this larger, more strategic role. Unlike marketing, which you could argue works in isolation, it’s the HR person who has to take over the culture of the workplace and in order to manage that culture, they have to understand the various cults within it. So they have to be respected for their deep knowledge of HR but they also have to be able to talk the language of business,” says Belcourt.
And as with any profession, professionals need continuous information and data to help them keep doing their jobs. Enter Belcourt’s other passion: research.
“What struck me reading the trade magazines was that the way HR practitioners picked up knowledge of how to do things was basically anecdotally. In other words, somebody at Bell Canada would try something and say, ‘We tried this and it worked’ and somebody at XYZ zipper manufacturing would look at it and say, ‘Let me try that.’ But, it may have worked for Bell but there’s no measurement to show that it would work in, for example, a dotcom company with 100 employees.”
HRPAO’s strapped for cash Human Resources Research Institute was moved to York two years ago and the International Alliance for Human Resources Research was born. Since then, finding corporate donors to sponsor the Alliance and research has been one of Belcourt’s full-time jobs.
She’s arranged for corporations to sponsor awards for graduate and doctorate students as an incentive to do research in HR and is currently in search of a $3-million endowment for a research centre.
An advisory board is also being set up so practitioners can help direct the research agenda. It’s another way of linking academics and researchers with the people who do HR everyday.
“A huge part of my life has been spent trying to link people who are doing really good research in HR with the practitioner community and trying to get the practitioner community more educated broadly.”
Two years ago, Belcourt spearheaded an effort to bring HR researchers together to discuss putting together a grant proposal to get funds from the federal government. Twelve researchers from across the country met. The grant was eventually denied but Belcourt’s colleague Saks, says bringing that community together was a success in itself.
“No one had ever brought that group of people together before,” says Saks.
“I think Monica is very entrepreneurial and extremely passionate about HR and she wants to share that with people,” adds Saks.
Around the same time, Belcourt was successful in getting a $100,000 grant through the Entrepreneurs Research Alliance from the University of British Columbia. For the last two years, eight HR professors and researchers have been studying the effect of HR practices on business growth and effectiveness using a Statistics Canada database thanks in part to her.
Today, at 54, and with a fresh bunch of students coming through the ranks, Belcourt is looking forward to see what the next 20 years will mean for HR.
But she is also taking more time with her family these days, vacationing, gardening, playing sports or raising buffalo at their cottage home near Collingwood, north of Toronto.
Starting this month, 50 students will be embarking on a unique academic journey.
They will be among an elite group of Canadian students who will graduate with a degree in human resources management.
The first-ever graduates of the Bachelor of Human Resource Management at York University in Toronto will be exposed to three-years of intense liberal and HR-specific education. Students who choose to complete the four-year honour program will take courses like strategic HR, international HR and career management.
It’s a long way from the days when personnel departments were staffed with people who “fell into” the profession without any formal academic or job-related training. Today, future practitioners have a clear path to get somewhere in HR.
And, it’s thanks in large part to Canadian HR pioneer Monica Belcourt.
When the government of Ontario was handing out money for innovative new academic programs, Belcourt leaped at the opportunity.
“The bachelor degree is an absolute dream degree,” gloats Belcourt in her second-floor office in the Atkinson College building, overlooking the sprawling York campus.
“We’ve reached the stage now. You have a degree in nursing, a degree in accounting. The profession has reached the point where there is enough academic content and demand for the graduates that this degree is worthwhile for everyone,” says Belcourt.
In addition to the undergraduate degree, and two successful HR-certificate programs, next fall York will also introduce one of Canada’s unique graduate programs in human resource management.
Before taking a teaching position at York, Belcourt notes that there were only two HR courses. Today, some 15 years later, York has one of the largest full-time HR teaching staff with five professors and 15 part-time professors, 20 HR courses and more than 150 students majoring or honouring in HR.
“What Monica has done is develop and build the best HR program in Canada. What she’s done is build a great faculty with amazing output and reputation,” says colleague Alan Saks, HR professor at York.
Getting the undergraduate and graduate degrees launched were just two accomplishments in a “grand plan” that has been in the making for more than 20 years. That grand plan is to bring HR to the level it has been aspiring to for years, through research, academic support, certification and ultimately licensing.
Considered one of the leading Canadian HR thinkers, Belcourt has had a tremendous impact on the profession. She drives to push HR research and to bring it to students and practitioners. She’s authored and co-authored leading Canadian textbooks in the field and has elevated HR in the academic community through sponsored research and grants. Ultimately, her greatest goal is to get HR the respect and recognition it deserves.
“The grand plan is to make HR a profession. In fact that’s been my professional life’s work. There is a body of knowledge out there and students and practitioners should know it exists.”
Belcourt herself happened into HR by “absolute luck and chance.”
After graduating with a psychology major from the University of Manitoba in her hometown of Winnipeg, Belcourt was recruited into the administrative trainee program by the federal government and put into a “personnel” position in Ottawa.
“That was my first exposure to personnel. I didn’t even know what it was then,” shrugs Belcourt, recounting her youthful naivete.
She stayed with the federal government for six years as a personnel officer and during that time, with a zest for knowledge and learning, completed two graduate degrees, one in adult education from the University of Ottawa and the other in organizational psychology from York. During that time she also married Michael, her husband of 30-years.
It was about that time when she realized the lack of learning resources available for HR practitioners.
“When I started there were no books or courses I could take to learn more about HR. While my friends whom had taken marketing and business had so many courses available to them I had nothing. Even when I went back to do graduate studies, I had no access to HR courses.”
When she completed her last graduate degree, the federal government placed her in the Career Assignment Program for “those that had the potential to move rapidly into management.” And that’s how she landed the top HR position with CP Rail in Montreal.
“It was a huge jump. It was scary. Like every entrepreneur says, ‘If I’d known what I was getting into I wouldn’t have done it.’ But, it was a tremendous experience for me. It was a huge opportunity to learn about HR and contribute.”
As director of a 10-member personnel department and with some 63,000 employees under her watch, Belcourt learned the value of HR and the need to keep proving that value to senior executives.
“When you’re introducing a program you’d better be prepared to explain to people at the senior levels how you’re going to spend the money and what benefit you’re going to give them. Can you talk generically about the benefits or can you talk specifically about the benefits? That was the biggest lesson I learned at CP,” says Belcourt.
With two years at the helm of CP’s personnel department, Belcourt took leave to have her first son. When she returned to the working world, she took a job with the former federal Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs as manager of consumer affairs. Since the job required her to be bilingual, she spent two months learning how to speak and write in French. Before she knew it she was dreaming in French. After two years, she resigned her post to have her second child but continued teaching organizational behaviour courses part-time at Concordia University.
When she returned to full-time work, she took a job as director of training and development for the National Film Board. It was in this post that she decided she wanted to go back to school again, this time for her doctorate in business. She went back to Concordia to teach HR full-time and enrolled in the business PhD program at McGill University. She also taught HR at French-speaking Universite du Quebec au Montreal.
Her family decided to leave Quebec for Toronto, where they had better access to services for their severely handicapped daughter. Her daughter died at nine years old.
Working, going to school and raising children was hard work but she had a support network and a nanny (whom she dedicated a book to) to help.
“I remember one Friday night putting the kids to bed at 8:30 p.m., exhausted of course and opening my statistics book and doing statistics problems for five hours and that was my life.”
Her husband, then president of Polo Ralph Lauren Canada, was supportive and extremely helpful. She also gave up her private consulting firm so she could be home more often.
“My husband is incredible. He gives so much. I would have hated to make a choice between my career and my family. Both have been incredibly exciting for me.”
With her PhD still to complete and the family moving to Toronto, she took a job at York teaching HR. Her third child, a son, was born soon after the move.
“Despite all my job hopping every two years, I’ve actually been at York now for 15 years,” says Belcourt, her doctorate degree hanging proudly on her office wall.
It was in her new teaching role that she began to realize how poorly HR was fairing in Canada.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto to teach HR specifically that I began to think how could we teach HR when we have no Canadian books, no Canadian research. The need for Canadian books was just so apparent,” explains Belcourt.
The same frustration was playing out in the provincial HR association. Belcourt had joined the Human Resource Professionals Association of Ontario (HRPAO) and soon became involved in the group’s drive towards certification. Belcourt points out that while HRPAO members had to take courses in order to be certified, they didn’t have access to Canadian material.
“The textbooks we were all using were American. That put us at professional risk because the Americans not only have a different worldview on how to handle HR issues, some of the information is also wrong and irrelevant in the Canadian context.”
She was inspired to write and edit a series of HR books for ITP Nelson that today total six, including Strategic Human Resources Planning, Managing Performance Through Training and Development. Four more are to be added and most are already into their second editions.
“It’s one way of bringing to students, who will ultimately be practitioners tomorrow, Canadian perspectives, Canadian laws, Canadian practices, facts, so we don’t put them at professional risk. They can learn about what the best companies in Canada are doing. At the same time, it’s not only Canadian content, it’s also offering them international perspectives.”
Today, Belcourt is on the board of directors and HRPAO representative on the National Capabilities Committee of the Canadian Council of Human Resources Association, which sets the standards for certification of HR professionals across the country. She takes pride in her work with HRPAO and NCC in getting the provinces uniformed in terms of certification.
Convincing other associations to adopt a more rigorous approach to certification that focused on knowledge primarily and experience second was difficult but Belcourt says it was a struggle worth fighting. Convincing people HR was more of science than an art was difficult but “this is the way it had to go,” repeats Belcourt.
While she does understand the frustration some feel about certification, she’s been a firm supporter of the process and thinks in the coming decade the profession will move inline with other professions and require practitioners to be licensed.
“I think what’s happened in HR is that people who have certain skill sets have been successful to a certain degree in the past. What I think has happened is that people in their 40s and 50s have not recognized that there is a huge body of knowledge out there and that there is a more efficient way of learning than learning through trial and error or anecdotally.”
She adds: “It’s the classic HR joke. ‘I’ve had 20 years experience, two years times 10.’ People say ‘I’ve been working for 20 years and I’ve been doing it and it works. Our graduates will be able to say, ‘It works and this is how it works and why.’
“The thought of some amateur HR person playing with terminating 3,000 people and doing it wrong is terrifying. We need licensing almost more than accountants or engineers because we impact peoples’ lives directly,” stresses Belcourt.
Human resources has changed tremendously since the days in the federal government when Belcourt was processing terminations and posting jobs.
“I think the major way HR has changed is now it is seen as a contributor, that HR programs and practices really do make a difference. That they are not just spending money without any benefit in return. HR wasn’t a profession and now it is,” says Belcourt.
It’s become more of a strategic player and she’s pushing that message forward, starting with her students.
“Without a doubt these students will have the ability to understand how organizations operate generally. They will have to have this knowledge as HR takes on this larger, more strategic role. Unlike marketing, which you could argue works in isolation, it’s the HR person who has to take over the culture of the workplace and in order to manage that culture, they have to understand the various cults within it. So they have to be respected for their deep knowledge of HR but they also have to be able to talk the language of business,” says Belcourt.
And as with any profession, professionals need continuous information and data to help them keep doing their jobs. Enter Belcourt’s other passion: research.
“What struck me reading the trade magazines was that the way HR practitioners picked up knowledge of how to do things was basically anecdotally. In other words, somebody at Bell Canada would try something and say, ‘We tried this and it worked’ and somebody at XYZ zipper manufacturing would look at it and say, ‘Let me try that.’ But, it may have worked for Bell but there’s no measurement to show that it would work in, for example, a dotcom company with 100 employees.”
HRPAO’s strapped for cash Human Resources Research Institute was moved to York two years ago and the International Alliance for Human Resources Research was born. Since then, finding corporate donors to sponsor the Alliance and research has been one of Belcourt’s full-time jobs.
She’s arranged for corporations to sponsor awards for graduate and doctorate students as an incentive to do research in HR and is currently in search of a $3-million endowment for a research centre.
An advisory board is also being set up so practitioners can help direct the research agenda. It’s another way of linking academics and researchers with the people who do HR everyday.
“A huge part of my life has been spent trying to link people who are doing really good research in HR with the practitioner community and trying to get the practitioner community more educated broadly.”
Two years ago, Belcourt spearheaded an effort to bring HR researchers together to discuss putting together a grant proposal to get funds from the federal government. Twelve researchers from across the country met. The grant was eventually denied but Belcourt’s colleague Saks, says bringing that community together was a success in itself.
“No one had ever brought that group of people together before,” says Saks.
“I think Monica is very entrepreneurial and extremely passionate about HR and she wants to share that with people,” adds Saks.
Around the same time, Belcourt was successful in getting a $100,000 grant through the Entrepreneurs Research Alliance from the University of British Columbia. For the last two years, eight HR professors and researchers have been studying the effect of HR practices on business growth and effectiveness using a Statistics Canada database thanks in part to her.
Today, at 54, and with a fresh bunch of students coming through the ranks, Belcourt is looking forward to see what the next 20 years will mean for HR.
But she is also taking more time with her family these days, vacationing, gardening, playing sports or raising buffalo at their cottage home near Collingwood, north of Toronto.
