Many moons ago, when I was studying for my degree, I specialised in ‘Labour Studies’. As I recall, my choices were that, Marketing, Accounting or a more general course. I wandered into Labour Studies because it had the lowest emphasis on anything to do with mathematics and placed more weight on the social sciences (ahem) of industrial relations, sociology, psychology and social psychology. This was ideal since I have always been a bit of a duffer with numbers once the subject progresses beyond ordinary arithmetic. In calculus, for example, I was more interested in knowing why the opposite procedure to ‘integration’ was ‘differentiation’, when my feeling was that ‘disintegration’ was more logical.
I never understood why I should need to know precisely how steep a slope on a graph was - I wasn’t going to ski down it – and my maths tutor was distinctly unimpressed by my assertion, when asked what I would do when I was a manager and needed these skills, that I should delegate the company statistician to do it for me. I failed my first year maths and statistics exam and just passed the re-sit because there was an over abundance of matrix questions on the paper. I could do matrices; I could add and subtract them, I could multiply and divide them. I never got a matrix problem wrong. I never understood what they were for or what I’d achieved by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing them, but I could do them, provided I wasn’t asked to apply them.
Knowing which way the wind was blowing, therefore, I decided that I was suited more for the social sciences, in which the correct answer was always a matter of interpretation, provided you could quote more published studies in your favour than against. Even then, if you fancied it, you could pick holes in the studies enough to cast doubt, so that even if there was evidence against your position, you could undermine and argue against it. The intellectual exercise and the reasoning process behind it was more important than the actual position you took. Indeed, I wrote the same essay twice in an exam because I knew one answer was being marked by a sociologist and the other by a psychologist. The only difference between the two answers was the concluding paragraph in which I interpreted the evidence for the benefit of the marker. Same question, same essay, same arguments, two markers, directly opposing conclusions, two passes. Result. I can do that.
Once I’d graduated, I found that my degree gave me an exemption from the part one professional exams for the Institute of Personnel Management. Of course, at this time there was a recession on and no-one gave two hoots about employment law or staff motivation, because just having a job was motivation enough, so I let it lapse and never became a member of the Institute at any level.
Twenty-eight years later, I almost wonder if I did the right thing. Of course, personnel management has long gone to be replaced by the rather more functional and mechanised ‘human resources’, or HR.
HR is a strange world. I do not think that the normal laws of the universe apply; it is a secret society closed to outsiders and I missed my chance. In all of my years in the civil service, I have never understood precisely what it is that HR or their predecessor organisations actually did. They have devolved recruitment and training to the line, they do not get involved in pay negotiations. We have a separate welfare department if things go wrong in either our private or professional lives. HR are a shadowy body, who no-one knows or has met. They are a secret, administrative black ops brotherhood with an unknown agenda and faceless personnel. I could have been one of them.
But now, when I want to find out details of my civil service pension plan, I find myself mired in the son et lumière shadow reality that is theirs and theirs alone. Named contact points do not work there and the reported office location is out of date. This is going to take some investigation.
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