Human Resource Development Master of Science Degree

A systematic approach to improve organizational productivity and competence of the internal workforce. It is a process of selection, analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of programs to allow the most cost effective influence on human behavior and accomplishment to solve organizational problems. (This course is restricted to student in the HRDE-MS program.) Lecture 3 (Fa/sp/su).

As organizations undergo continual change, HR leaders play a pivotal role enabling their organizations to anticipate, plan, and profit from change. This course introduces the student to theories and practices of organization development and change leadership. Such leadership requires competencies of identifying and framing challenges, consulting with clients, researching solutions, creating, implementing, and evaluating action plans. Through study, practice, and application, students will gain knowledge and skills to foster change, innovation, and the adaptability of an organization. Lecture 3 (Spring).

This is an introductory graduate-level survey course for organizational learning and knowledge management. The course will provide a broad overview of the concepts, practices, and challenges associated with learning in organizational contexts. Principles, techniques, and structures used to create, capture, store, value, distribute, and leverage knowledge to enhance organizational performance in continuously changing environments will be examined. Topics covered include types and nature of knowledge, levels of organizational learning, communities of practice, social and technological systems for capturing, storing, and distributing knowledge, valuation of knowledge assets, innovation and creativity, barriers to organizational learning, and knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. (Prerequisites: HRDE-710 or equivalent course.) Lecture 3 (Spring).

This course provides skills to develop, retain, and engage the best available talent required for current and future success. Students examine benchmark practices from all industry types to derive effective strategies for their own organizations, develop a human capital strategy development, and complete an integrated set of projects to implement selected components of the strategy. Lecture 3 (Fall, Summer).

Global human resource development is a method for developing employees in global organizations. In this course, students will be exposed to the fundamentals of developing HRD programs within a multicultural framework. The need to be aware of cultural differences and how to best address them is critical for the global company. This course will explore globalization and HRD, design and development of global HRD programs, delivery and assessment of global HRD programs, and consulting across cultures. (Prerequisites: HRDE-710 or equivalent course.) Lecture 3 (Fall, Summer).

Major change initiatives within organizations fail because of lack of understanding of the process of change and the lack of deliberate and focused attention to the change process. This course teaches students the change process and the alterations required in structures, processes, and activities to effectively implement change initiatives within organizations. The components of this course include applied approaches and tools to help analyze barriers for change, leverage power and influence, and provide frameworks to plan and implement change. Lecture 3 (Summer).

The workforce of the future is changing. It is creating challenges for organizations to continue to grow and develop their human capital. The role of the HRD professional is to act strategically, utilizing information system tools to ensure the workforce has the skills to meet the challenges of tomorrow. This course will provide a comprehensive overview of information systems used in HR to develop, assess, and provide data analysis of the workforce to meet the present and evolving needs of the organization. Lecture 3 (Fall).

As strategic partners in global workforce development, human resource development professionals guide organizations to build and maintain a diverse workforce. Diversity and inclusion exploit the natural synergies of a multicultural workforce. This course will examine dimensions of diversity beyond race, ethnicity, and gender and create opportunities to develop an understanding about how these dimensions intersect and play out in the workplace. The purpose of this course is to provide HRD professionals the knowledge required to manage these dynamics in an organizational setting and lead initiatives that will create and maintain an inclusive workplace. Project work will allow for the in-depth ability to assess the current state of diversity within a defined organization, conduct research and benchmarking to build a diverse workforce, and develop a diversity strategic plan with an on-going evaluation component to assess the success of diversity initiatives. Lecture 3 (Spring).

This course provides the student with the opportunity to apply their graduate course work to the world of work. Students will participate in internship opportunities in a work scenario similar to their ultimate career choice in the field. A mentor for the student must be identified in the place of the internship. The role of the mentor will be to work with students to develop a plan for the internship, facilitate the internship experience, and verify the student's accomplishment of specified outcomes as a result of the internship. Once the mentor approves of the plan of work and student accomplishments at the conclusion of the internship they will send this final report to the student's program adviser. (This class is restricted to degree-seeking graduate students or those with permission from instructor.) Lecture 3 (Fall, Spring, Summer).

Special topics is an innovative course not reflected in the accepted curriculum. Once the outline is submitted titles will appear in the course listing for the semester. The course may be taken more than once as topics change. (This class is restricted to degree-seeking graduate students or those with permission from instructor.) Lecture 3 (Fa/sp/su).

This course provides for independent study or research activity in subject matter areas not included in any existing course in the degree program, but having specialized value to students. Proposals approved by a supervising faculty member and the program chairperson are required prior to registration. This course may be taken more than once. Ind Study (Fall, Spring, Summer).

Service design is a holistic design process. It uses skills from a variety of disciplines (design, management and process engineering) to develop models to create new services or to improve existing services in the most efficient and effective manner possible. The emphasis of the process is to provide value to the customer; as a service differentiator or create unique experiences for the customer. Service design uses methods and tools from a variety of disciplines to assist with the analysis and creation of enhanced systems. These tools include; mapping, blueprinting, analysis of customer behavior, market analysis, service marketing, and service recovery. The outcome of this course is to provide students with the fundamentals of service design thinking to allow them to lead the efforts of systematic design in a variety of disciplines. (SVCLED-MS, HSPT-MS) Lecture 3 (Fall, Spring).

This is an introductory-level survey course on the dynamics of innovation. The course focuses on individual, team and organization-human and systems dynamics that impact organizational innovation. Students gain awareness in, understanding of and important skills in fostering multi-level organizational human ecologies conducive to the creation of innovation. Issues and challenges important to leaders at all levels in an organization, entrepreneurs and talent management practitioners will be examined and explored. There is a required fee for the class to pay for the administration of the ISPI and Meyers Briggs evaluation instruments. Students will develop in their understanding of innovation, their own personal innovation capabilities, preferences, and the human dynamics unique to innovation applied in an organizational context. This background is becoming increasingly critical to developing innovation capabilities in and across organizations in our increasingly competitive and complex world. This course will build awareness and improve competency in the application of overall course content and design principles particular to developing innovation-competent individuals, teams, and organizations. Lecture 3 (Fall, Summer).

This course introduces the concepts, principles, and practices necessary to lead into the future and avoid organizational mis-steps by taking an action-oriented approach to planning, implementing, evaluating, and revising competitive strategy in service firms. The course will address basic concepts and principles of competitive strategy, the process of developing and implementing strategy in organizations, development of robust, future-oriented strategies using learning scenarios, strategy mapping, and tools for strategy evaluation such as performance metrics, scorecards and dashboards. (Prerequisites: SERQ-710 or equivalent course.) Lecture 3 (Spring).

The Customer Centricity course develops the learners ability to help their organization manage its interactions with its valued customers across multiple channels, maximize revenue opportunities, build foundations to increase customer satisfaction, and drive customer retention and loyalty. Lecture 3 (Spring).

Analytics in service organizations is based on four phases: analysis and determination of what data to collect, gathering the data, analyzing it, and communicating the findings to others. In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of analytics to develop a measurement strategy for a given area of research and analysis. While this measurement process is used to ensure that operations function well and customer needs are met; the real power of measurement lies in using analytics predicatively to drive growth and service, to transform the organization and the value delivered to customers. Topics include big data, the role of measurement in growth and innovation, methodologies to measure quality, and other intangibles. Lecture 3 (Fall, Summer).

Managing public and private sector projects is a complex, demanding process involving ethical considerations, leadership, the ability to understand complex rules and regulations, the politics of the administration and the vagaries of the budget process. This conceptual framework will address planning, selection of team members, contracts and agreements, monitoring and adjusting the project progress and completion of the project through turnkey stages. The end result of this process is to contribute to establishment of trust of the stakeholders, minimize failure and maximize success. (Prerequisites: SERQ-710 or equivalent course.) Lecture 3 (Spring).

The service sector encompasses a large and varied arena making the assessment of service quality challenging. This course will provide quality evaluation strategies which span a variety of service sectors. To build a comprehensive picture of public and private sector quality service indicators will be reviewed as well as strategies to assess service quality. Each of these approaches will be analyzed, discussed and evaluated for the output generated. To assist with this overview, the Serve/Qual model, including the identification of service standards to meet and exceed customer expectations, will be used to evaluate service quality. Lecture 3 (Fall).

To gather and analyze public/private service sector information to inform decisions is the goal of every public/private sector administration. Data can drive success of governments and organizations or lead to their downfall. This course will explore data mining used in the public/private sector, how to gather it and utilize the results of the data collections to inform decisions that reflect the needs and desires of the stakeholders in this sector. Lecture 3 (Fall).

Achieving competitive advantage in today’s world demands that organizations know how to innovate, and do so not once, but repeatedly. Creativity, rapid learning through continuous improvement, and the ability to turn ideas into action, products, processes and services are crucial. How do leaders foster and sustain a culture of innovation? What unique competencies and skills do you need as a leader and what skills do your teams need? How is managing an innovation team different than managing other kinds of teams within an organization? Through this course, service leadership students will leverage and build on their growing knowledge about innovation, the individual and group skills required for innovating gained in SERQ-712. Students will gain deeper insights into innovation leadership requirements for creating, managing and curating a thriving environment in which cutting edge ideas are encouraged, born and grown. Open to students in the service leadership and innovation MS program and non-majors on a space available basis with department permission. (Prerequisite: SERQ-712 or equivalent course.) Lecture 3 (Fall, Spring).

Service interactions are an increasing segment of human interactions in today’s society. This course will examine service relationships, encounters and experiences from the perspective of human motivation and relating existing theories of social psychology to the delivery of services. An analysis of the interactions of customers and employees will help the student restrain their use of intuition and overlay critical thinking skills with human dynamics. The areas to be included in this course include; emotional intelligence, reciprocity, persuasion, conflict and communication, motivation, diversity, retention, and other related theories. Lecture 3 (Summer).

The use of creative problem solving to discover new alternatives in the design of products and services is the essence of design thinking. The innovation design thinking process seeks creative inspiration to solve a problem, generating and selecting ideas to develop a path from design to market. Design thinking tools and strategies are discussed as are “Wicked Problems” and the impact design thinking can have on developing a solution for these problems. An in-depth approach uses stories and prototypes to design products/ services in an effort to solve problems in an innovative and sustainable manner. Lecture 3 (Fall).

Internally driven service businesses have been the norm for many years, at best, customer-compelled companies understand the value of co-creation and customer centricity. In this course, students research and select design theories and customer centric processes to construct a customer co-created service system/process. This future-oriented approach allows the learner to apply foundation principles of service design and innovation to invent strategies to resolve customer problems. (Prerequisite: SERQ-710 and SERQ-720 and SERQ-712 and SERQ-723 and SERQ-740 or equivalent courses.) Lecture 3 (Fall, Spring, Summer).