ABSTRACT
Well within living memory, professional people joining an organization faced a long and slow climb up a hierarchy. Essential requirements were patience, application, and, above all, deference to the wisdom of one's seniors. Within the last decades this has changed dramatically. Critics might argue that the respondents' view that experience is vital is no more than one would expect from any professional group threatened with replacement by systems. Systems, however, require clearly defined situations and, as the author points out, professionals in Human resource deal largely with situations that are poorly defined. Formal training is of limited value as it necessarily uses model situations that are clearly defined. This is true even of the most realistic case studies. In real life the situation is nearly always untidy and the practitioner has to deal with the interactions of a large number of interacting variables, rather than a few well-understood effects.
