Journal: Human Resources Management in Education: Issues and Challenges

Author: Dr. (Mrs) Chinyere A. Omebe

Submitted to: Cesar Chester Relleve
Submitted by: Jose Karlo Q. Principe
Course Code and Title: EDL 111 – Human Resources Management & Organizational Behavior
in Education
I. Insight Gleaned from the Material
I learned so many things about this journal titled Human Resources Management in Education:
Issues and Challenges. I learned that human resources management is important because the
education personnel are the major instrument for achieving educational goals. It is also the key to
fast socio-economic development. I also find out about functions of human resources management
which are staff maintenance, staff relations, staff development, procurement of staff, and job
performance reward. There are also challenges that human resources are facing and they include
poor working condition, problem of staffing, funding, incessant transfer of teachers among others.
I also read that human resources management can be seen as the design of formal systems in an
organization to ensure effective and efficient use of human talents to accomplish organizational
goals. In 1997, Griffin defined human resources management as the set of organizational activities
directed at attracting, developing and maintaining an effective workforce. It also concerns the
procurement or recruitment, staffing, welfare, maintenance, training and retraining, placement,
promotion, motivation relationship, compensation or rewards, transfer and discipline of staff.
Additional to that, human resources management is a basic function of management that
determines the performance of staff in any organization. Every educational system at every level
depends heavily on the human resources for execution of its program. Nwakaand Ofojebe in 2010
stated that teachers are the critical resources for effective implementation and realization of the
educational policies and objectives at the practical level of classroom. A manager, whether in
private or public sector, who underrates the critical role and underplays the importance of people
in goal achievement, can neither be effective nor efficient (Oduma, 2012). Human Resources
Management has also goals and role in education. The goals of human resources management in
education are to develop the workers and to contribute to goal achievement. Human resources
management has some specific roles to play. These are strategic and operational roles. When it
comes to strategic role, human resources are critical for effective educational functioning. Human
resources were once relegated to second-class status, but its importance has grown dramatically in
the last two decades. When it comes to the operational role, according to Mathis and Jackson in
1997, operational activities are both tactical and administrative in nature. Griffin (1997) sees
operational role from the legal perspective because some have regulated various aspects of
employee-employer relations. Human resources management is therefore, interested in
compliance with equal employment opportunities and observation of labor laws. Human resources
has also functions in education. Human resources in education is a set of practices and methods of
integrating and maintaining the teaching staff in the school so that the school can achieve their
purpose and as well as meet the goals for which they were established. It is the motivation and co-
ordination of the activities and effort of the teachers in school in order to obtain maximum output
from them and consequently achieve the goals of education optimally. The functions include staff
maintenance, staff relations, staff development, procurement of staff and job performance reward.
There are also challenges of human resources in education. Human resources management has
become notably complex in the sense that as human beings, they are not reliable for doing one
thing over and over in exactly the same way. They can be expensive depending on their cadres,
qualification and skills. Their productivity is highly dependent on the person’s ability to instruct.
The same content cannot be delivered every time and a number of factors have contributed in this
complexity. Considering the importance of education in human resource management the
following are recommended: Education should be made attractive by creating a conducive
atmosphere for teachers, more government attention is needed for the education sector through
improved function as education remains the basis for the progress of all other sectors of society,
A united salary structure should be made for all categories of teachers within the education sector.
This paper concludes that education remains a veritable means of human resource management
and nation building. Whatever needs to be done in this sector should be done in all sincerely and
with urgency to fully achieve its predetermined educational objectives.
II. How the insights would be applied in the following areas:

a. Research
The insights about the issues and challenges in human resource management would be
applied by doing researches about the importance, functions, issues and challenges of human
resource management. Researchers should find ways on how to improve the quality of services
that the human resources management are giving. And because human resources are the key to
rapid socio-economic development and efficient service delivery, the Department of Education
must do something about it. They need to conduct different researches that would enhance the
quality of hiring teachers, giving trainings and compensation or rewards to teachers. The question
would be, how would the human resource management face and address the different issues and
challenges that destroy its image.
b. Practice
Human Resources Management must develop their practices when it comes to staff
maintenance, staff relations, staff development, procurement of staff and job performance reward
because as we can see in the Department of Education nowadays, teachers have many paper works
and they are complaining that they are not able to teach that much because of so many tasks. The
teachers are hoping that the department will do something to remove some paper works to give
more focus on teaching which is the main work of teachers. There are also changes in the
Guidelines for applying to higher positions in DepEd and every year, they are changing just like
the application of master teachers in Manila. They did not honor the master’s degree units and the
winnings of those who applied for the positions. The human resource management of DepEd
should provide better place for the teacher during their in-service training every October and May
and should hire better resource speaker because what happen is, our speakers comes from inside
the school and they are not experts in public speaking. Some of them are just reading their topics.