Marketing is from Mars and HR is from Venus

Few weeks back while I was coming back from a shopping mall in Chennai, I met one of our family friends. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, he asked me what my future plan is. To be more specific he asked me if I want to continue with my work or prepare for any management entrance exam. I told him about my post graduation plans in Human Resource. He said it was a wise decision. However, he was not completely happy with my decision to choose Human Resource as a career option.

His first and foremost reaction was that Human Resource was meant for women. I must admit that I was not completely surprised with his response but it did make my initial doubts a little more concrete. I went back home and tried a few search in google with the combination of the words like human resource & women. The result of the search reaffirmed the fact that women were preferred in Human Resource jobs more than men. I even went to some job websites and saw a lot of jobs which clearly stated the fact that only women need to apply for the jobs. Being a man [or rather a boy as I am 22 years young] and having a passion for Human Resource, reading such stuff did give me its share of insecurities. But then being a committed and aspiring Human Resource superstar, I had two options to choose from:

* Gender change operation- My family would have not approved it nor would I have approved it .Let us not get into deeper probing.
* Finding out some way to convince myself that what I read was completely or to a large extent wrong.

I chose the second option for obvious reason. I asked my cousin sister regarding this issue who is an HR professional [a woman too]. She said that it’s factually true as women in large number get selected for HR jobs. The reason is because women by law of averages have better soft skills. Similarly men by law of averages have better skills in marketing [now I did not mean to challenge any women’s marketing skills at work, Chillax!!!!].

So basically one needs to tone up their specific skills set for the required job. It is just co-incidental that some of these skill sets are traditionally believed to be more gifted to a specific gender but there is full scope for honing these skill set by both the gender.

But still ,men will be from mars and women from venus.
-Saikat Saha