Sunday, October 18, 2009

What Are The Odds Your Kid Will Grow Up to Be in HR?

The website BookofOdds.com had an interesting article recently titled "Hey Kids, Pick A Career", in which they give certain odds on what occupations your child (or any child born for that matter) will become a certain profession.  As you can imagine they give you some of the obvious first, like odds my kid will be a:

  • Surgeon: 1 in 2,872
  • Professional Athlete: 1 in 9,684
  • Fashion Model: 1 in 81,440
  • Fire Fighter 1 in 452
  • Elementary Teacher 1 in 87

Because you know, we all thought we were going to be one of those when we grew up!

I don't know about you, but I when I took the career interest assessment in my junior year of high school it didn't say I was going to be a HR Pro (I think mine gave me my top 3 "best" career choices, which honestly in order were 1. Teacher; 2. Floral Designer; 3. Sales).  Not sure how the Floral Designer got in there, but to this day I love working out in the yard - so there must be something to those assessments. There wasn't even a category for HR or Personnel or Hiring Guy or anything. 

So, Book of Odds really got me thinking about what my 3 son's will be when they grow up. I know their personal choices right now (oldest to youngest) are: 1. Pro Athlete, 2. Pop Star, 3. Stay at home with Mom.  Sounds like I would expect, pure and innocent, anything is possible - including spending the rest of my life at home in my pajama's watching Cartoon Network in Mom's bed as Dad goes to work.  In reality they are more likely to be:

  • Administrative Role: 1 in 5
  • Sales: 1 in 9
  • Food Service:  1 in 11
  • Healthcare: 1 in 19
  • Education: 1 in 16

What about HR? 

  • Human Resources: 1 in 656.9 
  • More interesting: 1 in 10 HR Pros make under $28,030 per year (ouch!). 

Well, I'm not 1 in a 1,000,000 - but hey only about 304M people are in the US.

Thanks to Tim Sackett, SPHR is the Executive Vice President of HRU Technical Resources in Lansing, MI.