A Study of Essential Competencies and Skills of HR Managers in Sri Lanka

Skills and competencies are vital assets for any individual in order to carry out the tasks and duties in triumphant manner. In today’s globalized and exigent business environment Human Resources (HR) managers need apposite skills and competencies to thrive in business organizations. Even though skills and competencies are important to HR managers; researchers have identified that an empirical gap is existing in Sri Lanka; as Sri Lankan researchers have not conducted the researches in the area of competencies and skills of HR Managers job which consists with Senior Manager (HR), HR Manager, Group HR Manager, Group HR and Administration Manager and HR Manager (Specialized HR Function). The research question of this exploratory study is what are the skills and competencies needed or expected by the organizations in Sri Lanka for HR Managers? There are two research objectives in this current study, mainly; to identify the skills and competencies needed or expected from HR Managers by the Sri Lankan Organization and to give an insight on theoretical perspective for the skills and competencies needed for key HR Managers. To achieve those two research objectives, researchers used HR job advertisements appeared in Sunday Observer Newspaper, Topjobs website for the period of November 2015 to November 2016 of time. The current research was carried out in non-contrived setting and the time horizon of the study is longitudinal under minimal interference of the researchers’. The findings of this exploratory study proved that communication skills, interpersonal skills, computer Literacy, leadership skills and negotiation skills were identified as most expected skills for HR Managers in Sri Lankan Organizations. As per the second major finding of this study researchers found that human skills from three managerial skills introduced by Robert. L. Katz are mostly expected skills by the Sri Lankan organizations. The findings of this study are useful to current HR Managerial job holders, future HR Managerial job seekers, teachers, university lecturers and educational policy makers.