ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about a story of three graduates, Don, Annette and Rob, entering the human resources field, encounter and deal with workforce management challenges and issues and developing their own professional competence through experience. Don a director of an organization was needed help in order to deal with the challenges he faced relative to his workforce planning initiatives. He had lunch with Kathy, who was looking for research sites, and his staffing needs came up. When Don talked about bringing Kathy aboard with some of the other managers in the department, he ran into a bit of skepticism. Don knew that the research manager spot would take some selling, since HR were confident they knew what the behavioral research had to say about what will work and what will not. With a new respect for the need to align functional strategies, the HR staff committed themselves to increasing cross-functional participation to make their strategy formulation and execution more effective.
