First Day in New Orleans for SHRM

Greetings from the Big Easy. This will be short and sweet since I got up WAY too early for my taste and only was home for 36 hours between the Cool Works Yellowstone / Teton adventure and taking off for NOLA. One could say my life has been a bit of a whirlwind. Also, in the midst of the 36 hours at home, I learned that all three of my photography entries made it into the juried photography show at the Shoreline Arts Festival. Yay me. I also did a lot of laundry.

Back to New Orleans. First, I'm happy to be here and to be sharing with other HR folks who could not make it to the 2009 conference. Merci beaucoup to the SHRM folks for giving me this opportunity. I am also thrilled to meet some of my long time twitter friends and other HR / recruiting bloggers whom I have admired for some time. Also, it's great to see "old" friends from previous conferences. No doubt, the virtual world is fantastic, but it sure is wonderful to have face to face conversations. I look forward to many more over the next few days.

I think the biggest take away I got today from SHRM directly was their influence in creating a standardized curriculum for HR students. They've created a template that has been implemented at over 100 schools across the U.S. This is a wonderful start. Certainly, when I was in college and already had an inkling that HR was something I wanted to do, the classes weren't there. I took one HRM class as a part of my business minor, but that's it. I'm glad to know that they're moving forward with this idea. Having a basis of knowledge in addition to what is tested on via the HRCI certification exams is good.

And, if you follow me at all, you knew that there would be photographs. They're not fancy, but you get the idea.

For real time updates, please follow me on twitter, or get the daily summary from here in New Orleans at the end of each day on this blog. Thanks for reading.