The vital role of strategy in strategic human resource management education

An informal survey of syllabi available on the Internet suggests that firm strategy has generally received inadequate treatment in strategic human resource management (SHRM) courses. This weakness reflects limitations in the SHRM research stream and it makes SHRM education unnecessarily narrow. In order to produce effective SHRM practitioners, strategy must become a central component of SHRM courses on an equal footing with HRM. This paper describes the advantages of doing so and offers some practical suggestions about how SHRM course instructors can begin infusing strategy into their SHRM courses.